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LAW AND FREEDOM IN 
THE SCHOOL 


THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


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NEW YORE 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED 
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THE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED 
SHANGHAI 


LAW AND FREEDOM 
IN THE SCHOOL 


“Can and Cannot,” ‘Must and Must Not,” 
“Ought and Ought Not” in Pupils’ Projects | -——----~ 
bel Ani Ur Fal, 

F Antes 
JAN 21 19 


BY ge 
GEORGE A. COE ae 
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Teachers College, Columbia University 


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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO ILLINOIS 


CopyRIGHT 1924 By 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 


All Rights Reserved 


Published March 1924 
Second Impression December 1924 
Third Impression April 1926 


Composed and Printed By 
The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 


PREFACE 


The theme of this essay is law as a factor in school 
projects—natural law (the ‘‘cans and cannots”’), com- 
mon and statute law (the “musts and must nots’’), 
and moral law (the “oughts and ought nots”). Many 
pens have discoursed of late upon the educative possi- 
bilities that reside in the pupil’s own will when it freely 
develops in an appropriate social environment; let 
me speak of that within or roundabout every project 
that conditions his will. 

Law, then, not merely or chiefly as subject-matter 
to be studied, but as a dynamic factor in project- 
situations, and as an actual or possible control therein— 
this is the field of our study. Purposeful activity on 
the part of the pupil is the most educative experience 
in the world, no doubt; but what starts purposes going, 
what gives them their content, how much of the actual 
purpose comes to clear definition, and how much is 
wrought of which neither teacher nor pupil takes 
account? Again, since the school is a_ purposeful 
activity of society, pupils’ projects must be thought 
of as being, at the same time, projects of the larger, 
encompassing will. What, then, is the actual relation, 
and what the desirable relation, between these two factors 
in school experience ? 

So inveterate is the habit of assuming that free pur- 
poses, at least in the case of children, are antithetical 
to law, that to bring law into the foreground, as I am 
about to do, may seem to imply rejection, distrust, or an 

v 


De 


vi PREFACE 


intended restriction of the project method. But this 
would be a misunderstanding. In order that my readers 
may not mistake any of the points that I am driving at, 
let me say abruptly and bluntly that I am writing this 
essay under a conviction that the project method has 
come into education—has been coming into it for more 
than a century—to stay there, and to grow until it 
dominates schools of all grades. It is not a tool that our 
taste or convenience picks out from several alternatives, 
but primarily a law of mind and character; therefore, 
not something to be selected or rejected, trusted or dis- 
trusted, restricted or extended, but understood and incor- 
porated into our purposes as teachers just as we incorpo- 
rate plant physiology into agriculture. 

I am using the term project, of course, in the sense 
that makes purposing, and particularly purposing 
together, its distinctive mark. Not the material worked 
upon, nor the products that result; not action with 
accompanying satisfaction; not pleased attention, but 
purposeful self-guidance. This connotes desire; conflict 
between desires; selection through discriminating judg- 
ment; forethought and planning; fitting means to ends; 
carrying a planned activity through; judging the product 
and one’s self by means of it, and thus making ready for 
further self-guided action. Purposing, in this full sense 
and range, is nothing less than the process—and it 
alone contains the generative force—whereby one 
comes to one’s self as a person. Used collectively, it 
is the democratic process. Our theme represents, 
therefore, a part of the general problem of how democ- 
racy can come into existence, and how it can improve 
itself. 


PREFACE vii 


On the other hand, I am sure that we have only 
begun to comprehend the educative project. Some 
factors in it are obscure and even elusive; the relative 
isolation of the school from what is called ‘‘the world’s 
work” conceals various factors; some factors, as I shall 
show, actually produce illusory interpretations of experi- 
ence. What I hope to do, then, is to bring such facts 
to light in order that a fuller and more effective use of 
the principle may be made. I, for a time, limitations 
of the project as it is commonly conceived are made much 
of, and if barriers to the use of it seem to be in process 
of erection, in the end the project-approach will be shown 
to be capable of solving its own difficulties. The prin- 
ciple will exhibit its vitality, not by proving that it can 
tolerate exceptions, not by going around obstacles, but 
by going through them in the strength of its inherent 
truth and value. 


GEORGE A. CoE 
THE GLENDORA FOOTHILLS SCHOOL 
GLENDORA, CALIFORNIA 
March, 1923 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
I. THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW .. . 


II. Naturat LAw BotH OPENS AND CLosES Doors. . 
III. THE PRoJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE... 
IV. NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW IN THE PROJECT . 

V. THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND THE WILL OF SOCIETY . 
VI. How THE YounG AssImMILATE Morat Law 

VII. Morar LAw AND MorRAL CREATIVITY IN THE SCHOOL 
VIII. THe ScHoor AND Economic LAW 
IX. THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK SOCIETY . 


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CHAPTER I 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS 
UPON LAW 


That the best-laid plans of mice and men depend 
for their outcome upon something else than planning; 
that law besets us behind and before; that our freedom, 
though it be worth all the world to us, is at most but a 
pearl within an ocean; yes, that our freedom is achieved 
only in and through obedience to law—all this is a com- 
monplace comment upon life. We hear it over and over. 
That it holds for school projects, and must needs be one 
determinant of what we are to mean by project method, 
should require no argument. 

Yet, in our eagerness to free the teacher and the pupil 
from hampering, largely artificial, laws imposed by the 
school of yesterday, we thus far in the project movement 
have been interested in freedom and the consequences 
thereof rather than in the conditions and the limitations 
of freedom. 

Therefore, it may be worth while to contemplate 
pupils’ projects from this neglected angle. In the 
present chapter an endeavor will be made to bring to 
clear consciousness what we ordinarily overlook. We 
shall for the most part pass in review teaching situations 
and processes of familiar types, merely noting factors 
that, in subsequent chapters, will be subjected to analysis 
in order to ascertain the bearing that such facts have 
upon the whole theory of the project. 


I 


2 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


Probably no type of project received so early, dis- 
tinguished, and nearly unanimous approval by eminent 
educators as college athletics. Here we have initiative 
on the part of students; team work; self-imposed dis- 
cipline; management that requires continuity and 
perseverance; consequences that count, and student 
judgment upon achievement. Who has not heard 
college presidents speak glowingly of the educational 
values of this experience, particularly of the development 
of rigid self-control on the part of individuals, and of 
training in social unity and co-operation? But some 
consequences occurred that were not “denominated in 
the bond.” What happened when the football team 
“broke training’? for good at the end of the season was 
not in the educational spotlight; only rarely did the 
sort of business training acquired in competitive, gate- 
receipt games come before the footlights; none but a 
few inquisitive scientific minds stopped to find out what 
physiological after-effects might be expected. “I cannot 
dive in my old form,” said a ‘‘grad’’ to me when we were 
swimming together some five years after he had finished 
his football career; ‘‘I supposed that I was through 
with my knee injury when I left the university, but I 
find that I was not.” 

A single glance like this at unplanned-for by-products 
of students’ projects in athletics should be sufficient to 
remind us that ordinary natural laws, physiological 
and psychological, grind out results, good and bad, on 
their own account—that is, without regard to the good 
intentions of the students or of their faculty advisers. 

A boy who had conceived the project of making a 
hammock spent a considerable amount of his Saturday 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW 3 


time sawing and whittling out the necessary “needle.” 
When his labor seemed about to be rewarded by the 
possession of a tool ready for use, the frail timber that 
he had chosen to work with split, and the whole project, 
for the time at least, was frustrated. Very likely this 
experience was more valuable for this boy than easy 
success would have been, but in any case what happened 
to him educationally was determined not merely by the 
fact that he purposed something and proceeded to execute 
it, but in part by conditioning natural-law factors that 
did their work entirely apart from his purpose. 

The obverse of this case may be seen in children whose 
projects, though well defined as to the product desired 
and as to the material to be wrought, turn awry because 
muscular strength, or muscular co-ordination, or mental 
continuity, is insufficient for the task. Any one or more 
of several consequences may ensue, as the breaking-up 
of a co-operating group because one member cannot do 
his share, yet insists upon doing something; discourage- 
ment of initiative; a habit of self-depreciation or of 
fretting; “‘faking.’’ One is justified in wondering what 
really happens, educationally, by reason of the unfinished 
jobs that strew the path of such organizations as Boy 
Scouts. ‘‘Yes, I know how to do it,”’ said one of them 
to me. “Show me, then,” said I. It turned out that 
his project of acquiring one of the Scout skills had been 
carried through in his imagination only. Doubtless, 
under some conditions the experience of failure can be 
highly educative, but the conditions need to be carefully 
scrutinized. Again, many projects require a succession 
of decisions, of which the first is likely to be the easiest. 
Suppose a pupil is simply incapable of sustaining his 


4 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


interest in the face of increasing and unforeseen diffi- 
culties. He has started, he is willing to do his part, 
but nature prevents him from going on, and the educa- 
tive results are determined partly by this fact. 

Some city boys start to make “pushmobiles”’ for 
themselves out of grocers’ boxes and old roller skates. 
Here, one would say, is a project that may be made 
educationally valuable. But the teacher happens to 
know that the ‘‘pushmobile,” by exercising the two legs 
unequally and unsymmetrically, produces deformities.” 
The teacher’s experience proves, too, the practical impos- 
sibility of inducing children systematically to change 
sides with this plaything so as to exercise both legs alike. 
Therefore, the making of ‘‘pushmobiles” in the school 
shop is not permitted. For the moment let us postpone 
the question how a teacher might best handle a situation 
like this; let us simply contemplate the fact that the 
future welfare of the child, as determined by natural 
laws, becomes through the teacher a “‘Thou shalt not,” 
which no urgency of the pupil’s purpose can revoke. 
Perhaps all children aspire to grow up and be strong, 
but the conditions of doing so, much more the conditions 
of symmetry, may fail to make a strong appeal. The 
effects of present causes are so distant that they do not 
seem real and unavoidable. Therefore, whatever the 
pupil’s ability or lack of ability to form and carry out 
projects directed toward health, strength, and symmetry, 
the teacher must not swerve from the known require- 
ments of what might be called the laws of future welfare. 

As scientific research increases our knowledge of 
these laws, the area that we are under obligation to 

* The fact has been communicated to me by an eminent orthopedist. 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW 5 


control grows larger, and the number of processes that 
are necessary, even though the young can have little 
knowledge or appreciation of them, increases. A certain 
private school causes every pupil to be examined period- 
ically with reference to the physical factors that deter- 
mine health, growth, and symmetry of body. The 
pupil who comes nearest of all the group to fulfilling the 
ideal of physical perfection is found, nevertheless, to 
be using one foot in such a way as to create danger of 
“flat-foot”’ in later life. The staff, therefore, decides 
that this child, for the sake of her future, must take 
corrective exercises now. How the required exercises 
in this instance were related to the project principle I 
shall tell after a little; at the present moment let us 
contemplate simply the fact that children whom we 
are accustomed to think of as so healthy and normal 
that they need no attention or control may in reality 
require much. Law is as minute, and as implacable, in 
the psycho-physical organism as it is in an explosives 
factory. 

When certain boys became interested in guinea pigs, 
many phases of the educative project were promptly in 
evidence. Here was a self-chosen end, and here were 
forethought; planning and construction of pens; the 
daily routine of feeding the pets and cleaning the pens; 
discrimination of strains as to color, weight, and form; 
breeding for a particular type, with resulting knowledge 
of sex and of heredity; co-operation in study and in exe- 
cution of plans. At the height of the interest the boys 
were certain that there was “money in it.” Didn’t 
fancy pigs bring as much as a dollar and a half? For 
days one boy insisted that he must have one of them for 


6 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


breeding purposes; he could easily get the money back 
by selling the offspring. But suddenly the bottom 
dropped out. ‘“‘We’re going to stop raising guinea pigs,” 
said one of the boys. “The fad is over [in the towns 
’round about], and there’s no money in it any longer.” 
How slow children are to realize the force of economic 
laws, and yet how important it is that these laws should 
have a right part in educational projects. 

To get up early, climb to the hilltop, build a campfire, 
see the sun rise, and in this setting talk over some of their 
shortcomings with a _ teacher-leader—this was the 
spontaneous project of ‘“‘the dormitory.’”? When the 
eastern sky began to turn from gray to gold, ‘“‘Boom, 
boom, boom’? went the tom-tom as the procession of 
happy penitents started—happy because they had 
found a pleasing way to right a wrong that they had 
committed. But alas, how tangled together are right 
and wrong! Near by were families and small children 
who had a right to their morning sleep. This right had 
been recognized in a school rule against making noise 
before the regular rising hour, but the rule was for- 
gotten, and so a second wrong had to be righted. This 
“had to be’? was an educational imperative. For the 
sake of the offenders even more than for the sake of a 
handful of persons who might lose a half-hour of sleep, 
it was essential that law, in the form of a school regula- 
tion, should find a place in pupil projects. 

A troop of youngsters goes into a forest bent upon 
the laudable educative purpose of building a log cabin. 
Selecting a fit site upon rising ground close to a brook, 
they begin to fell the necessary trees. Hereupon the 
owner appears and strenuously objects to their pro- 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW 7 


ceeding. They argue, perhaps truly, that he has more 
trees than he needs, that the forest will be benefited by 
thinning out, and that it is important to them to become 
masters of woodcraft. But the owner—unreasonably, 
perhaps—invokes his right under the law, and by threat 
of compulsion he puts an end to their project. Here a 
law of the state rather than the purpose of the young 
determines the course of the project, and thereby com- 
pulsion of this type becomes the most important educa- 
tive factor in the situation—the most important as 
measured by effectiveness, not necessarily by whole- 
someness, for there is no doubt that the first conscious 
contacts of the young with common and statute law 
often train them in lawlessness. 

A sixth-grade class was discussing a proposal to take 
part with the rest of the school in helping a neighboring 
day nursery. Some of the children argued that they 
had heard ‘‘day nursery” until they were tired of it; 
their parents were helping, anyway, and something more 
interesting could be found to do. “But,” said one little 
debater, “‘somebody’s got to do it, for the nursery really 
needs more income. It lacks this, and this, and this.” 
Seeing that they could not agree, the children turned to 
the teacher for guidance. He suggested that a committee 
be appointed for further study of the situation in the hope 
that some action might be suggested that all could accept. 
The little chairman appointed as one member of the 
committee the boy who had most strenuously opposed 
doing anything for the nursery. On a subsequent day 
the committee reported substantially as follows: “Of 


t This supposititious case arises out of my observation of the grue- 
some maiming and destruction of trees by boys’ axes in public woodlands 
and privately owned groves in and near New York City. 


8 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


course we’ve got to do something, and if we’re going to do 
anything it ought to be large enough to do credit to 
the class. We recommend an appropriation of $5.00.” 
The report was unanimously adopted, and thereby the 
class did more for the nursery than the teacher himself 
would have advised. Let us consider for a moment what 
is indicated by the words of the committee: ‘‘Of course 
we've got to do something.” What is this “got to,” 
this law that is enforceable only through the free consent 
of those whom it commands? Let us call it, broadly, 
moral law. 

The obligation was brought home in this instance by 
two main processes: Contemplation of the situation at 
the nursery, which aroused intelligent sympathy and 
brought into action a habit already formed of helping 
neighbors who needed help, and the pressure of opinion 
in the immediate school environment. Now, these two 
phases of moral law—appreciation of ends, and the 
force of social customs, standards, and opinions—do not 
bear any constant ratio to each other in conduct. Some- 
times the directly felt value of something passes over into 
action without reinforcement from social sentiment; 
sometimes a standard enforces itself almost entirely 
through imitation and other forms of suggestion, so 
that one acts morally, and forms habits of so acting, 
with next to no satisfactions except those that arise 
from social approval and disapproval. At a later point 
we shall have to wrestle with the significance of this 
distinction for educational theory. What is the relative 
value, we shall ask, of projects in which morally good 
action arises in response to a perceived and appreciated 
need or possible value, as compared with projects in 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW 9 


which moral action consists in conforming to a social 
standard without fresh contacts with the ends that 
justify it ? 

A knot of boys was conversing in a moderate tone 
when one spoke up vehemently: “But, is it fair?” 
He had encountered law in still another sense, the law of 
the ideal. Another instance is that of a youngster who 
had been doing a certain duty reluctantly, often receiving 
pay for doing it. On one occasion he suddenly said to 
his mother: ‘‘I’ll do it, and you needn’t pay me for it.” 
In his Sunday school he had caught a glimpse of an ideal 
relationship of boys to mothers, and the ideal had taken 
hold of him. as a law. Did you ever observe a group of 
pupils deliberating upon the question of adopting the 
“honor system” in examinations? If so, probably you 
witnessed a struggle between the claims of an ideal and 
the counter-claims of the actual, between “‘as it should 
be” and ‘“‘it is too difficult.” 

We do not stretch the proprieties of language when 
we speak of the ideal as law, for persistent idealizing 
marks the strivings of humanity as truly as does legis- 
lation. We are summoned from within to a sensitive 
and generous living that outruns all formal rules and 
regulations. It outruns public opinion, too, being more 
fine in its discriminations and exacting in its expectations; 
it outruns even what goes under the name of morality. 
This paradox, that we recognize a higher law within and 
yet beyond our laws, a higher self within yet above the 
self of each of us, a something more moral than morality, 
is interpreted by religion in the thought that God is a 
morally creative will working within humanity through- 
out its evolution, 


Io LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


This is not the place to press this or any other inter- 
pretation, but it is the place to contemplate the fact of 
law in the form of ideals. It is true that injurious things 
have been done in the name of idealism, or of moral 
authority, or of religion, but let us not offset error by 
folly—the folly of ignoring and doing nothing about one 
of the great areas of human motivation. It is true that 
the nature of ideals has been mistakenly conceived, and 
that we need on all accounts to realize that they arise 
out of the actual, that they are historically conditioned, 
that they require revision, and that sometimes they stand 
in the way of vigorous grappling with actualities; but 
the fact that ideals are thus human proves, not their 
powerlessness, but their power. If realism should forget 
this, it would be insufficiently realistic; if pragmatism 
should forget, it would be insufficiently pragmatic. 

The point of this for us teachers just now is not that 
we should choose appropriate ideals and proceed to 
‘impress’? them upon the minds of the young; not that 
we should put the name of God into the Constitution, 
and the Bible and worship into tax-supported schools; 
not that we should slacken the pace of our movement to 
bring education closer to the practical requirements of 
life; but first of all that we should recognize the plain 
fact that pupils do form ideals of great import whether 
with or without our help, and that ideals represent a 
species of motivation, an actual or possible inner law 
in projects. 

An adolescent girl’s journal intime that I was per- 
mitted to read in manuscript sometime ago revealed this 
situation: She was the daughter of a widow in straitened 
circumstances. She loved her mother with the same 


THE DEPENDENCE OF PROJECTS UPON LAW 11 


intensity with which she loved a certain young man— 
no, with greater intensity. For she not only dreamed 
of projects for earning money that should relieve her 
mother from the necessity of grinding labor, but she 
assisted her mother in this labor, and in addition carried 
through the project of secretly writing a story for 
publication. The details of her prolonged labor under 
cover of night, and of the crushing disillusionment when 
her manuscript was rejected, form a human document 
of rarely moving interest. The intermixture of reals 
and ideals, of dreams and hard work, is remarkable. 
Yet it does but paint in unusually vivid colors factors 
that enter into the experience of all of us. And not least 
among the practical idealists is he who seeks to awaken 
society from an illusory idealism, to bring experience 
down to solid ground, to induce men to see whatever is 
seeable and then ask themselves: “In this situation, what 
doTI really want?” To insist that the good is not static, 
and that the idea and the expectation of change be incor- 
porated into morals, religion, and education is as much 
as to say that ideals are the proper masters of the actual, 
and that they are of the very essence of the project. 

We have now glanced at six phases of law as an actual 
factor in the projects of the young, whether we will or no, 
and whether either pupil or teacher is aware of it or not. 
They, alongside of definitely conscious purposes, are so 
many determiners of the educational outcome of school 
projects. These six are: 

1. Natural laws.—They represent what can or cannot 
be, and hence determine success or failure, either because 
of the nature of materials or because of the nature and 
condition of the pupil. These laws determine, likewise, 


12 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


by-products in body and mind, desirable or not, and 
whether aimed at or not. 

2. Teacher-laws——Based upon insight (which the 
pupil may or may not possess) into the conditions of 
present and future welfare, teacher-laws see to it that 
these conditions shall prevail in the situations in which 
the pupil is placed. 

3. Economic laws.—They apply within a considerable 
range of the motivation and conduct even of small 
children; often determine success or failure; and like- 
wise affect many human relations. 

4. Common and statute law.—It is a compulsory 
factor in the experience of young and old, and the con- 
scious contacts of the young with it determine important 
social attitudes. 

5. Moral law.—It appears in the two forms of the 
good, or values that depend upon me, and obligation, or 
the pressure within me of the demands or expectations 
of others, whether human or divine. In both forms it 
is, of course, a factor in the purposes of the young. 

6. Ideals as laws—Being most completely self- 
imposed, ideals may be regarded as the last steps in 
self-assertion, but as they actually are imposed, and as 
they cost labor and even what men call self-sacrifice, 
they may well be called laws. 


CHAPTER II 


NATURAL LAW BOTH OPENS AND 
CLOSES DOORS 


Sometimes it is necessary to utter a truism in order to 
give the right setting to what is not truistic. In the 
present instance the truism is that within every purpose- 
ful act of teacher or pupil, natural law is a co-determinant 
of all that occurs. Needless to say, perhaps, I am now 
using the term “natural law”’ in the popular sense that 
permits one to distinguish men as thinking, free-acting 
beings from nature as a mechanism. The laws of this 
mechanism appear within our very own activities in the 
material in which one works (my own act adjusting itself 
to the nature and processes of the material); in the tool 
that one uses; in the energies that one turns to account— 
the weight of the hammer, the heat of the forge, the 
actinic rays of the sun; and in environing conditions 
that affect the human organism, as atmosphere, tempera- 
ture, illumination, bacteria, and distracting sights and 
sounds. These things obviously have much to do with 
what shall be wrought in the materials and in the child. 
For short, we may say that natural law prescribes the 
extent to which a given desire is attainable; if attainable 
at all, the cost in terms of materials consumed, labor, 
risks of failure of the project, and risks of pain, sickness, 
or deformity; and, whether attainable or not, what the 
educational gains and losses will be, not only in the way 
of intelligence and skill, but also in the way of mind- 
sets. ‘This is the truism. 

13 


14 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


What is not a truism is that society and the school are 
facing a part of this truth about law less squarely than 
another part. Let us note the ways in which, in child- 
hood as well as in maturity, we consciously encounter 
the something that in maturity we call ‘natural law.” 
Nature often presents herself as a blank ‘‘Thou canst 
not” that paralyzes the project attitude. Who has not 
seen a child weep over the refractoriness of some material, 
or over the recurrence of an obnoxious event, or over the 
inco-ordination of his own muscles? On the other hand, 
nature invites us with a “Thou canst,’”’ her laws appearing 
now not as a restriction upon the project attitude, but as 
a stimulus of it. Have you ever seen a boy discover the 
water-wheel possibility of a brook, or even the echo- 
possibility of a hill? But, in the third place, natural 
laws are so intertwined with one another that whenever 
we accept nature’s invitation to form a project we invari- 
ably become subject to some further law that henceforth 
restricts the scope of our effective choices. Whenever 
we enter an open door, some door closes. ‘There is set 
before us, say, a varied table from which we eat and drink 
what we will, but the food and drink, once taken into the 
body, become subject to chemical changes, and we 
ourselves inevitably become subject to them. A child 
can saw a board in two, or divide a length of cloth, 
but he can never thereafter recover the board or the 
length of cloth—they are gone forever. This third 
aspect of law is the one to which we give the least 
attention. 

The experience of free activity in a project leads on, 
then, to experience of restriction and limitation that 
otherwise would not exist for us. We never can reverse 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS 15 


any process so as to go back and “‘begin all over again.” 
Yet, under the illusion that we can at any time make 
a fresh start by merely reversing something that we call 
our own will, we consume materials that cannot be 
replaced, repel personalities that never come our way 
again, make psychic wounds that leave a scar even if they 
heal, reduce our own power to achieve, or even put to 
sleep our desire to do so. Thus, though we are fairly 
aware, in our projects, of the “Thou canst”’ and of the 
“Thou canst not,’”’ we do not with clearness recognize 
the “Thou canst, but. .... ‘fs 

This sounds, perhaps, like a homily upon adult life. 
But in fact there is no break in this respect between 
childhood and maturity. It is strictly true that ‘we 
pass this way but once.’’ The better we know the psy- 
chology of childhood the more certain it becomes that 
early experiences are important determinants of the whole 
course of one’s life. Anything like this was hidden from 
the old rationalistic psychology of ideas. It allowed one 
to think (whether or not this was directly asserted) that 
the essential activities of mind are those that appear in 
its ideas; that ideas, though they originate in sense 
experience, detach themselves from their sense basis 
and become, as it were, free-floating entities, and that, 
therefore, one might at any time become any sort of 
person by having the appropriate thoughts, and might 
thus take advantage of any resource that nature contains. 
Hence, child experience, whether in health or in disease, 
was not regarded as significant. The play of children, 
their contacts with nature and with people, their likes and 
dislikes, their pains and pleasures, their emotional up- 
heavals, their enterprises and achievements, even their 


16 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


curiosity, were regarded as temporary matters, all to be 
left behind in the journey toward manhood. 

We are now recovering from this disastrous error, 
just as we are recovering from the parallel notion that 
certain diseases, as measles, are to be expected in child- 
hood, and are nothing more than an inconvenience of the 
period. The parallel is remarkably close. Just as 
measles may have after-effects that were unsuspected, so 
the whole psycho-physical process in the early years 
produces mind-sets that later in life are designated as 
bent, peculiarity, disposition, idiosyncrasy, gift, natural 
aversion, ‘‘complex,”’ genius for, character, personality. 
We know that childish whims, fears, tantrums, sex- 
interests and reactions, social attachments and repulsions, 
sense of success or of failure, sense of strength or of 
weakness, satisfied or baffled curiosity, feeling of freedom 
or of restraint—we know that all these have after- 
effects of great importance. ‘Thus, when nature entices 
us to enter any open door—to enter it either voluntarily 
or impulsively—she closes doors the instant we enter. 
Any act, any experience, limits the remaining alterna- 
tives in some specific manner. / 

Of natural law as opening doors of opportunity, 
of the wonders of control that are rapidly coming to 
view, so much has been said that little needs to be added 
here. ‘This little, however, is by no means unimportant. 
It is twofold. First, who is to wield this enormously 
increasing control of natural resources that the sciences 
are making possible? Second, to what ends are these 
resources to be applied? As yet we have only a partial 
answer to either of these questions. It is evident that 
direct control of natural resources by individuals and 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS 17 


small aggregations of men is passing into indirect and 
diminished control by the many and enormously in- 
creased control by the few who manage the ever more 
organized industries and businesses. The ends to which 
our augmented powers are being directed are in major 
degree the increase of power on the part of those who 
already have the most, and in minor degree the improve- 
ment of human life. This is reflected in an interesting 
manner in the federal income-tax law, which exempts 
from taxation gifts for religious, philanthropic, and 
educational purposes to the extent of only 15 per cent 
of one’s income. That is, if one gives away 30 per cent 
of one’s income instead of 15 per cent, the second 15 
per cent is not exempted, because this would increase the 
tax of those who give away a smaller proportion of their 
income. To him that withholdeth, more withholding; 
from him that giveth most generously, a second giving in 
the form of taxation is required. 

Law as invitation to power is bound to play a great 
role in school projects. Rightly so. The fascinated 
child of the future school is to be, not the amused child, 
not the passively appreciative child, but the child who 
experiences increase of power through scientific laws and 
processes. What, then, shall he experience as to the 
distribution of power, and what shall he experience as 
to the ends to be served by it? Natural law opens doors, 
but doors to what? It is certain that pupil projects will 
give some answer to this question. The answer will come 
whether teachers plan for it or not. It will come from 
the customs of society, from the common speech of men, 
from examples of men of power. Therefore, it is essential 
that teachers should definitely assume responsibility for 


18 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


this inevitable phase of school projects. Upon this point 
more will be said when we reach our discussion of eco- 
nomic laws as factors of projects. 

In view of the restrictive and door-closing aspect of 
natural law, one would naturally assume that the whole 
movement from infancy through childhood and adoles- 
cence into maturity should include, project-fashion, the 
discipline of  self-restriction—better, perhaps,  self- 
organization and self-balance—as well as the discipline 
of self-expansion and outward achievement. Surely, 
one would say, any people that enjoys even a moderate 
measure of schooling will be schooled in this respect. 
Yet a dispassionate survey of our society will show that 
this is not the case. Here is a suggestion toward such 
a survey: 


We know far better how to heap up resources than how to 
increase our joys even were our resources unlimited. 

We are so absorbed in the machinery of life that, instead of 
running it, we are run by it. 

We are increasing the speed of life, but we do not know whither 
we are actually going, or whither we really care to go. 

Men live wastefully. They strive to make ends meet by 
increasing their income far more than by regulating their expendi- 
tures. 

Men live disproportionately, not seeing great things as great 
and small thingsassmall. For the most part they do not even look 
to see. 

Men live below their capacity. On the whole they do not 
shirk work, but they neglect the prior choices upon which the level 
and the meaning of work depend. 

Most of us violate the plain dictates of hygiene, and as a 
consequence rarely maintain for long a reasonably high physio- 
logical level. 

In spite of the rudimentary knowledge of eugenics that is 
within everybody’s reach, almost unregulated preference controls 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS 1g 


mating, good stocks are constantly diluted, and society is burdened 
with defectives. 

Marital happiness is sought where, in the nature of the case, 
it cannot be found. 

Most parents bring up their children by impulse and guess- 
work, yet believe that they really love their offspring. 

Day by day the old, old story of self-indulgence that is self- 
defeating and self-destroying repeats itself. 

Multitudes of young persons, though they are desirous of 
success in their occupations, constantly do the very things that 
prevent or restrict success. 

The country is sprinkled over with investment schemes into 
which intelligent men and women—some of them teachers—are 
pouring money that will never return. 

In industrial relations, and in international matters, our great 
men are desperately engaged in gathering figs from thistles. 


Thus, untold mental and bodily vigor, and untold 
natural resources are being expended upon what the 
“gentle pessimist”’ of the Old Testament calls ‘“‘vanity, 
and a striving after wind.” One might ask whether men 
really know that two plus two equals four, or believe 
that ‘“‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”’ 
For, in every one of these items knowledge adequate to 
show a better way is somewhere available. 

Educative processes of the right sort could prevent 
a large proportion of this waste of opportunity, of happi- 
ness, of vigor, and of resources. The young drift into 
permanently injurious, or permanently inferior habits; 
they do it without evil intent, and indeed often at the 
very time that they are strenuously pursuing educational 
or occupational ends. Men fail to grasp the good that 
life holds out to them, not in any large measure because 
they deliberately or even consciously turn aside from 
any wisdom that they ever possessed, but chiefly because, 


20 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


in childhood and youth, they had too few of the experi- 
ences that could start them on the road to wisdom. 
Either a habit of thinking of life as within natural law 
is not formed, or natural law is presented too exclusively 
under the aspect of opportunity for satisfying desires— 
as matters most commonly stand, opportunity for con- 
trolling things and men so as to increase our income, 
and thereby increase our ability to get what we want. 
Of law as pitilessly defeating our desires, of law as pre- 
venting us from having desirable desires, and of law as 
imposing undesirable by-consequences even when we get, 
what we think we want—of this how little do we learn 
until too late! 

Here is an unsolved problem of teaching. If we may 
distinguish between a narrow positive wisdom that is 
concerned with how to achieve a few obvious ends, and 
negative wisdom (what desires not to follow, either 
because they cannot achieve their objects, or because 
achievement is too costly), then we may say that educa- 
tion is far better developed in the direction of narrow 
positive wisdom than in the direction of even the broadest 
and most important negative wisdom. Our most effective 
teaching concerns the tools and processes for achieving 
the conventional ends of life—the ends toward which 
one moves with the least demand for discrimination. 

That negative wisdom, however vitally needed, lags 
behind conventional positive wisdom is due to an inherent 
difficulty that has a psychological basis. The restrictive 
aspect of law is the one that children and adults, too, 
least readily appreciate. To a child a jack-knife is a 
tool that cuts sticks; that it cuts fingers also is in the 
shadowy background of thought if it is there at all. To 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS 21 


adults automobiles are things with which one can “get 
there’; how slow we are to take in the fact that they 
slay and maim as in a battle. To a child a deep pool 
in a stream means fishing or swimming, not possible 
drowning. To adults a big pool or lake is a thing 
toward which water flows, therefore a convenient destina- 
tion for sewage, but likewise a reservoir whence water can 
be procured, and hence a convenient source for the 
water supply of a town. How long it takes even intelli- 
gent citizens, in spite of abundant knowledge of typhoid, 
to make up their minds not to drink dilute sewage. 

Anyone who thinks that the necessary work of educa- 
tion in respect to negative wisdom can be done by saying 
“Don’t do this” and ‘Don’t do that” is welcome to his 
thoughts. Less unwise are teachers who rely upon 
abstract scientific intelligence to solve our problem. 
For genuine intelligence—which is not to be confused 
with correct concatenation of words in an examination— 
is surely handy in emergencies. But wisdom implies 
more than this, even a habit of seeing what is needed, 
and a habit of thinking of the sciences in their relation 
to needs. The problem for the school, then, is that of 
producing cultivated repulsions as well as attractions— 
cultivated in the sense that seeds of likes and dislikes 
are sown and watered and the resulting plants weeded; 
attractions and repulsions cultivated in the further sense 
that they are brought into relation to known causes 
and effects. In a word, our schools must do more than 
they are now doing in the way of negative—that is to 
say, self-restrictive—discipline of the project type. 

But we have to face the fact that some things that 
are in intimate causal relations to our desires must not 


22 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


be learned by children through their own experience of 
the effects. Being poisoned by poison ivy is an effective, 
but too costly, way for a Boy Scout to learn how to care 
for himself on a “hike” into the hills. Rattlesnake 
fangs can teach, after a fashion, but the fashion is not a. 
good one. What not to eat is not to be learned by eating 
it, for unwholesome diet creates an appetite for itself, 
and besides it reduces the physical tone that is required 
for education generally. There are fields into which the 
pupil should be induced, as far as possible through his 
own conviction, never to enter. As in diet, so in respect 
to the sex appetite, it is important to go right the first 
time and every time. The eyes need very early to be 
protected from misuse, even misuse suggested and urged 
by worthwhile motives, such as interest in good literature. — 
For the sake of protecting myself and others from infec- 
tion, it is necessary not to trifle or dally even a single 
time with this or that attractive and innocent-looking 
situation. 

These samples are selected from the field of hygiene. 
If we understood mental and moral causation as well 
as we understand the body, we should possibly find 
parallel acts and experiences, usually called mental, that 
likewise maim and destroy. What is the effect of the 
first success in deliberate and planned cribbing in an 
examination? Let us ignore for the moment the little 
deceptions into which pupils impulsively slip; let us 
consider only real projects in deception. Satisfactions 
of various kinds ensue upon success—escape from a 
disagreeable study by finishing it; the social standing 
and the opening doors guaranteed by a good mark; 
approbation of parents; mastering, or at least defeating, 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS 23 


a teacher who thinks himself the master; the sense of 
power that comes from doing a difficult thing; admira- 
tion from fellow-pupils for one’s adroitness. From a 
single experience of this kind a serious, permanent set 
might result. Are we as sure of the effect of any counter- 
education that we know how to provide as we are of this 
set? Even if such a case is not quite parallel to the 
permanent injury of a bodily organ, should not schools 
fortify pupils, through projects anti, against the first 
temptation to crib? Wide-awake teachers know that 
in various parts of the country most of the pupils of 
certain grades acquire subterranean information about 
facts and methods of cribbing, and are subject to the 
influence of subterranean standards ad hoc. 

Whether it is similarly important to forestall all 
experience of gambling is worth considering. A parent 
said, ‘‘My son of fourteen is absorbed in a form of poker 
that is played by boys in our neighborhood. What will 
be the effect ?”’ The stakes were not money, or anything 
of value beyond the fun of the moment and the satisfac- 
tions that arise from the possession of skill. But the 
well-known mental processes of the grown-up poker- 
gambler were cultivated, the technic of a gambling game 
was learned, and certain of the grown-up gambler’s 
joys were had. This suggests the following question: 
If the natural laws of habit-formation are what we take 
them to be, and if gambling, as most of us believe, is a 
social evil, is there any way to keep the young from 
ever falling into it unless education includes projects 
anit ? 

What is to be the relation of school projects to the 
failures of adults—the foolishness or the wickedness, 


24 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


the tragedy or the emptiness, of misguided or unguided 
individual lives, and the wastes, the futilities, and the 
injustices of social organizations? ‘Thus far the school 
activities to which the name project is approvingly 
given are those that typify, and if possible participate in, 
the worthwhile activities of adults. Examine specimen 
projects almost anywhere, and you will find plans for 
enabling children to have the satisfying experience of 
success in doing something that is inherently worth 
doing. Such positive projects should undoubtedly 
form the main staple of school procedure, but they should 
contain or be supplemented by project factors specifically 
directed toward the avoidance or prevention of ills. 

It is true that in the execution of positive projects 
dissatisfactions are bound to occur, with the result of 
teaching some negative wisdom. Inaccurate measure- 
ments, haste, carelessness with tools, untidiness, social 
friction, unfavorable judgment upon the product passed 
by teacher and fellow-pupils—all these help to steady a 
pupil’s will. Yet such defeats, pains, and negative wis- 
dom as these are altogether minor and accessory; the 
end here aimed at by the pupils does not touch even the 
borderline of the false conventional aims or the uneco- 
nomical and destructive processes that these same pupils 
will encounter in adult life when they engage in the same 
sort of positive activity. 

Instances in point might be gathered from many parts 
of our economic, political, and social life. Take, for 
example, our wasteful exploitation of natural resources. 
Wood-working projects in the school are likely to take 
timber for granted; it is one of nature’s open doors. 
Yet timber, looked at soberly and socially, means that 


NATURAL LAW OPENS AND CLOSES DOORS) 25 


our wonderful forests, once a public domain existing for 
the benefit of the people, are being destroyed for private 
profit. How many of us know how long it takes patient 
nature to make a pine tree? Once I counted the rings 
of a smallish Norway pine that was about to be used for 
temporary piling in connection with the elevation of a 
railroad track. They numbered 175. A nearby maple 
of similar size had only a hundred less rings. The 
larger white pine trees are found to have 250 to 300 rings. 
A board, then, according to the way you look at it, may 
be either a potential shelf, or a specimen of nature’s 
artistry, or a summons to stop the waste, rapidly 
approaching exhaustion, of our forests. 

It is easy for school projects to awaken admiration 
for works of man that are only partly admirable. Our 
tall buildings may serve as a convenient example. 
The coming of steel seems at first sight to give us a 
solution (in part) for the problem of rising ground-rents 
in our cities. For, by increasing the height of our 
buildings from four or six stories to twenty, we multiply 
several fold the amount of business that can be done 
upon a given number of square feet of land. Yet, in 
city after city, streets and sidewalks that accommodated 
the people under the old conditions can do so no longer— 
the capacity of the tall buildings outruns the capacity of 
the streets. So, we build subways; but at one end of 
them we erect more tall buildings, at the other end of 
them more apartment houses, so that shortly the sub- 
ways and the streets both are congested. Then we 
build more subways, only to repeat the problem. Yes, 
great) is") stéel;: buts)! Magnificently impressive 
are our tall buildings, but..... 


26 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


A century or more ago the westward-moving popula- 
tion came upon a river that offered wondrous water- 
power. Here were three water-falls, two of them of 
great height. What should be done with such a river 
but build mills and mill-races along its banks and in its 
gorges? Result, a large and thriving city, but the 
magnificent old river flows, sewage-laden, between the 
repulsive back walls of factories and storehouses, while 
the populace pants for open spaces and natural beauty. 
Natural law opens doors, but whenever we enter she 
closes some door. 

Here, then, in a nutshell, is the educational situation 
and the resulting problem: Both nature and the con- 
ventions of society in its dealing with natural resources 
invite and urge us, both children and adults, into projects 
that are either impracticable or too costly—projects 
that first yield satisfaction but afterward restrict, 
impoverish, overburden, or injure us. Saying “Don’t” 
is not an effective way to counteract the readiness of 
children and youth to respond to such allurement, or 
to prevent them from admiring unduly human works 
whose size and glitter conceal the revenges of law upon 
man’s projects. Some help, but not enough, comes from 
knowledge of the causal relations involved. Therefore 
something in the nature of projects anti, or at least 
contra-conventional, appears to be required, or possibly 
projects that are two-edged, both pro and anti. An 
early task of progressive teachers might well be some 
exploration in this direction. 


CHAPTER III 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF 
NATURE 


Thus far we have treated natural law as popular 
thought treats it, namely, as playing a part alongside 
of the human will. That we have not completely or 
consistently adhered to this point of view, however, is in 
the nature of things. For law is within us as well as 
around about us, and the laws that are within connect 
our activities with the whole system of nature. The 
project itself is a natural phenomenon. An ancient 
one, too, not a flower that has just bloomed for the first 
time. A child’s persistent exploration of objects with 
hands and eyes; his insistent questions; his climbing, 
running away, doing something to see what will happen; 
his fondness for making things, and his pride in his 
products; his desire to have a part in the doings of his 
elders; his impulse to accumulate, sort, and classify 
things; his efforts to master animals, other children, and 
adults; his emulation of skill and prowess—this is a 
partial indication of how the sap of human nature con- 
stantly thrusts out project buds. 

That project method in teaching depends upon and 
carries out this project impulse in our nature has been 
sufficiently said by others. But insufficient attention 
has been given to the fact that education as such selects 
between what I have called project buds, predestining 
some of them to free development and others to arrest 


27 


28 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


or extirpation. Now, the situations in which pupils 
are to be placed are far more minutely and continuously 
scrutinized by project teaching than by the methods that 
it is displacing. Hence we might say that in the project 
method nature turns upon herself more discriminatingly 
than before, and grows cautious even of her own project 
impulses. We have just seen that nature, as well as 
the conventions and customs of society, often urges us 
into disastrous projects, sometimes miseducating us and 
then leaving us incapable of re-education. As a conse- 
quence, the suggestion was made that we should have in 
the schools projects anti as well as pro. ‘This conclu- 
sion rests securely upon the grounds already adduced. 
But the grounds are broader and deeper still, and they 
require something still more radical. This I shall 
endeavor to show in the present chapter. Taking for 
granted the beneficent training that nature provides 
through our multitude of project impulses, let us squarely 
face once more the inherently and inevitably injurious 
activities, purposeful as well as impulsive, into which 
she leads us, and then ask what significance they have 
for the theory of the project. 

Using the term ‘‘nature” in the broad sense that 
includes the whole of human nature, we may say that the 
misdirected energies of men, the monumental failures of 
individuals and of societies, the wrongs that groan their 
way through history and still cry to heaven for redress, 
all are natural expressions of men in natural environ- 
ments, all are phases of the project in developed form. 

In a scientific age these things glare at us with hot 
scorn. For, apart from the shortness of life, the major 
woes of mankind are no longer those occasioned by 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 29 


natural calamities—storms, earthquakes, avalanches, 
droughts, inescapable plagues—but those occasioned 
by us men through our failure to apply our knowledge 
where it will do the most good. And our curse is not 
inactivity, for we are full of action, such as itis. A vast 
proportion of our activity is organized, too, systematized, 
and directed to desired ends. Human life is not chaos, 
it is not anarchy, it is not beastlike obedience to instinct; 
it is, on the whole, project life. But something is wrong, 
or many things are wrong, with our projects. Millions 
of children are undernourished in countries that are rich 
and resourceful; they are undernourished not because 
we cannot feed them, but because we are busy with 
projects that do not include their welfare. The pitiful 
education that the public schools are offering to most of 
the children of this country is not due to inability to 
provide better education, but to preoccupation with 
projects that seem more important. So with municipal 
misrule. We could have honest administration of our 
cities if we wanted it intensely—we surely know enough 
—but we do not make it a part of our business, that 
is, our project. 

And what shall we say of the mountainous failure 
that is now in the minds of all of us? Consider, for a 
moment, the significance of war merely as a project— 
as a whole-hearted, purposeful, social activity—without 
regard to its justification or lack of justification. Never 
did human beings guide the forces of nature into thought- 
determined channels upon such a scale, with such rapid- 
ity, and with such precision, as in the Great War. Never 
did the capacity of men to work together in great masses 
so clearly reveal itself. Here, measured by the natural 


30 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


forces and the men involved, is the greatest demonstra- 
tion we have ever had of the project capacity of men. 
Never again let it be said that intelligence that can wage 
war in this manner cannot put an end to war! The 
reason why the end of war does not come is that men 
are engaged in projects that seem more important than 
insurance against international conflict. ‘‘While thy 
servant was busy about many things, behold, he was 
gone.” Nay, this is only the lesser part of the truth. 
The secret, formerly known to the few, became a pos- 
session of the many during the Great War, that modern 
wars do not happen chiefly because we are absent- 
mindedly employed upon something entirely unrelated 
thereto, but because we carry on industry and commerce 
by a species of minor war that leads on toward major 
conflicts between nations. Our everyday projects are 
themselves infected with the virus. 

The popular excuse for ancient man-made evils is 
that strong and ineradicable impulses of human nature 
obstruct and defeat reason. That is, the impulses of the 
other fellow, of course! Said Mr. A to Mr. B: “Human 
nature being what it is, war is inevitable.” Said Mr. B 
to Mr. A: ‘‘You yourself are able and willing to live at 
peace with all mankind, aren’t you?” “QO, yes!” 
replied Mr. A. “How does it happen, Mr. A,” rejoined 
B, ‘‘that you consider yourself so much better than the 
rest of mankind?” Thus do we excuse the shortcomings 
of our projects, our definitely purposed activities, by 
alleging some weakness of human nature in the rest of 
the world! 

But this self-deception, too, is a part of nature’s way 
of starting projects and making them go. Her versatility 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 31 


is astonishing. ‘Through our natural interests she teaches 
us to sow and reap; then she adds a farm tractor to the 
processes of wheat-growing; and then she devises a sub- 
marine to destroy the wheat. One and the same subtle 
sex interest teaches now how to make faces bloom by 
intelligently directed diet and exercise, then how to 
make them bloom by intelligently directed powder-puffs 
and lip-sticks. Doubtless nature is bent upon teaching, 
and she does it by the project method, but what is her 
curriculum ? 

A striking phase of this situation is the fact, already 
touched upon, that adults as well as children are more 
responsive to opportunities for action than experience 
warrants them in being. The likelihood of discomfort 
at the end of a project does not control our conduct 
as much as equal likelihood of success and satisfaction. 
The action’s the thing. A well-known example is the 
slowness of men to submit to control by their own 
reason in matters of sanitation and hygiene. We are 
so busy, so full of projects, that we do not have time to 
make ourselves either safe or comfortable! Other 
examples are “‘get-rich-quick”’ schemes, and . . . . well, 
our whole economic fever. For surely we are not in the 
business of manufacturing human happiness or character. 

In human conduct, then, plus A and minus A do not 
cancel each other. Equal magnitudes, placed in oppo- 
site scale pans, do not leave the beam horizontal. Some 
irrational factor, we infer, must infest the project atti- 
tude as such, a factor that pulls us toward action per se 
rather than toward rational good. 

This over-readiness is reinforced, or revealed, by three 
interlacing psychic processes: (1) There is the fact, long 


32 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


recognized under other names, that we now call ‘“‘ration- 
alization.” We initiate courses of action, we know not 
why, or only half know, and then find reasons for them. 
Having found reasons for them, we stiffen them, syste- 
matize them, and pursue them dogmatically—and 
sincerely. Whatever we are voluntarily engaged in, 
and much that is involuntary, we tend to “‘rationalize.” 
(2) Everyone who is not morbidly depressed represents 
the past in his memory, not just as it was experienced, 
but with modifications in the interest of his self-esteem. 
The errors of our memory are not hit-and-miss; they are 
like loaded dice. And the tendency of this irrational 
factor is to the justification and hence continuance of 
courses of action already entered upon. (3) Precisely 
in line with this is the experimentally known fact that we 
forget unpleasant (or restraining) experiences more 
readily than pleasant (or stimulating) ones. Our 
“‘forgettery”’ as well as our memory favors action more 
than it favors discrimination. 

Thus does the human mind gaze with a magnifying 
glass upon its successes, both past and prospective, and 
with a reversed lens upon its failures, both past and 
prospective. Our nature has a skew; we are bent first 
toward irrational risks, and then away from clear con- 
sciousness of the losses that our foolish conduct brings 
upon us. 

Let us speak more literally. Action as such is satis- 
fying whenever the organism is in fit condition for action. 
This is one of the constants that deflect the scales in 
which we weigh our projects, whether they are already 
accomplished, or in progress, or merely contemplated. 
Again, this satisfaction in the mere fact that our powers 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 33 


are in exercise is enhanced when the realization is brought 
home that these powers are my own, or that J am con- 
trolling something or somebody. Milton’s hero, Satan, 


would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Just so, ,. 


a child will weep over an act that he feels is forced upon 
him, but glory in the same act when he feels that it is an 
achievement of his own. Thus it is that sometimes, 
paradoxically, children experiment to see how much they 
can endure, and even adults not seldom certify to them- 
selves their own strength by voluntarily creating hard- 
ships. If we were to reinstate the old hedonistic cal- 
culus, we should say that the immediate satisfaction of 
action as such (favorable organic conditions being 
granted), and especially the immediate satisfaction of 
self-activity, is sufficient to overcome an appreciable 
amount of immediate discomfort, a large amount of 
remote discomfort even though it be certain, and an 
almost unlimited amount of remote discomfort if it is 
only probable, not certain. All this obviously tends to 
introduce an illusory factor into our projects. 

The explanation of this peculiar, deep-seated weight- 
ing of action as such is found in nature’s primordial 
method of sustaining, perpetuating, and evolving species. 
Action, abundant and varied, though it means death 
to many members of a species, is the way in which 
nature makes sure that at least some members shall hit 
upon the means of sustenance and strength. She makes 
good the enormous losses that are incident to this process 
by a compensating fecundity. It is true that the evolu- 
tion of specialized organs and instincts is accompanied 
by reduction in the range of the risks taken, and by 
corresponding reduction in fecundity; but the method 


34 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


of hitting the mark now and then by firing a great many 
shots in a general direction remains in operation in every 
species. Even in the human species, which has the 
advantage of insurance by means of analysis and fore- 
sight, the older and more expensive sort of insurance is 
still in operation. 

It operates unless it is resisted ‘‘head on,” that is, by 
rational self-control. The marks of rational living all 
center around a certain checking of ourselves. Thus: 
(1) We postpone action while we analyze a situation so 
as to determine upon a more specific objective. (2) We 
rearrange the causal factors, both outside ourselves and 
within ourselves. (3) We reorganize our habits so as 
to utilize the right causes with the least deflection by 
irrelevant impulses, and so as to keep us going right even 
when we do not stop to think. (4) We protect from 
themselves individuals, as children, who are not yet 
capable of this self-checking. (5) We perpetuate the 
controls thus resulting by incorporating them into sys- 
tems of education. 

In our species, this, the latest-developed method of 
adjustment, exists side by side with the primordial 
biological method. ‘To some extent they can be harmon- 
ized, as in supervised play. Yet they do not coalesce. 
Far from it; they are so antithetical to each other that 
one of the chief functions of reason and of education is 
to displace the wasteful and painful adjustment processes 
of pre-rational nature by the more economical processes 
of nature-become-rational in man. 

This brings it to pass that rational living is possible 
only at the cost of internal strains. Plato is not exactly 
popular at present; nevertheless his figure of the unruly 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 35 


steeds and the stiff reins that have to be held upon them 
seems made to fit modern conditions. And it fits other 
conditions than the overabundant sex urge that makes 
us so much trouble. It holds, likewise, for the group of 
impulsions that underlie, first, the securing of food, and 
then the accumulation of possessions. Whatever the 
part played by native greed, rivalry, and the instinct 
of mastery, on the one hand, and by desire for food and 
for the security of self and offspring, or by the play 
impulse (business is a game) on the other, our economic 
activity is clearly not adjusted to our needs, is not guided 
by foresight of them in any such measure as would 
necessitate the judgment that we are rational creatures. 
The chief sign of growing rationality in our economic 
order is not its enormous and complicated organization 
of resources and of human power, but the internal strain 
that it is beginning to feel with respect to its own motives 
and results. Our economic system is an unruly steed 
just as truly as sex. For our whole civilization is taking 
as a self-evident good economic processes, privileges, and 
results that mix good and bad, justice and injustice, 
more abundant life and impoverished life. If, then, 
we desire to educate through projects that involve 
economic consciousness, we must incorporate in these 
projects a critique of the economic order. Rational 
economic living is possible only at the cost of internal 
economic strains. 

There is an old and popular belief that parental 
impulse in and of itself is wise. Especially the mother- 
heart is by nature endowed with insight, or with instinct 
that takes the place of insight. The mother, even 
without scientific study of children or of education, is 


36 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


held to be the best possible nurse and teacher. The 
grain of gold that this popular opinion contains makes one 
loath to attack it. There is, undoubtedly, moral value, 
primal social constructiveness, in the experience of 
family affection, especially if it issues in a genuinely 
co-operative scheme of living. But this “if” is a large 
one, and the possibilities of unwise and ineffective affec- 
tion are legion. If parental affection were wise, it would 
give the parent no rest until he learned what science has 
to say as to the nutrition and physical care of the child; 
as to how habits are formed, and what habits need to be 
formed or avoided in childhood; how to instruct children 
of different ages concerning sex; how to co-operate with 
the day school and the church school in their work of 
teaching; how to develop self-guidance in the child, and 
how at last to emancipate him from parental control. 
If parental affection were wise! What we see in most 
families is action, often genuinely planned action, based 
upon the fallacy that what I feel strongly must be so, 
especially if I act from affection. The result? Ask 
any teacher who knows intimately the life of children! 
Here, again, the project as the method of nature requires 
cautious scrutiny and deliberate checking. 

Yet there is a certain amount of justice in the present 
reaction against the interpretation that Plato and a long 
line of Christian teachers have given to the division that 
is within us—the division that makes us human. They 
ascribed our trouble to the existence of a lower or sense 
stratum in our nature. Reason they thought of as a 
supernal essence against which sense is in constant rebel- 
lion. On the other hand, modern science finds in human 
nature no such break as this. Senses and intellect, 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 37 


instinct and reason, bodily desires and spiritual aspira- 
tions, all are phases of one whole. There is continuity 
of process and—what is more important for our present 
discussion—there is continuity of a dynamic sort. No 
such thing as unmotived thought, passionless reason, 
or self-evolved spiritual aspiration exists. We are 
creatures with interests, and our interests envelop and 
suffuse all that we are. We think not only with our 
brain, but also with the autonomic system, and with our 
glands of internal secretion. Out of this sense-rooted 
endowment grows the best that we are in science, art, 
morals, and religion as truly as the various degradations 
that we fain would cover up. 

This truth has consequences that our culture generally 
has not perceived or desired to investigate. They would 
shock a Plato. One of them is that, since the blood that 
flows in science, invention, art, religion, and morals is 
the very same blood that flows through our most untamed 
impulses, even our superior guides for conduct are never 
quite competent. This is true both of propositions or 
maxims as guides and of men as guides. For the meaning 
of a proposition or maxim never resides in the words, but 
in the way they are taken, the setting they have in a 
given order of society. ‘Thou shalt not steal” means 
any one of several different and sometimes conflicting 
standards. Think of the possible meanings of neighbor- 
love that have scarcely begun to dawn upon those who 
confess allegiance to the second great commandment. 
As to men as guides for men, they cannot quite achieve 
competence because they are swayed within themselves 
by the very forces that they think to control. All 
our superior men are influenced by what is temporary and 


38 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


passing in the life about them. There are styles in 
science itself; art, as it is, is largely fashion; if you will 
give a concrete description of any moral or religious sys- 
tem, social psychology will tell you what stage or type 
of society it represents. As we have “‘period furniture”’ 
so also we have period culture even where we strive to 
achieve the fixed and eternal. 

A second consequence is that we ‘“‘rationalize” even 
reason itself wherever it anywhere concretely operates. 
We are overfond of our best, not merely of our worst! 
Our systematic overreadiness for action, and our over- 
readiness to persist in action that 1s once started, espe- 
cially action that heightens our sense of self (individual 
or social), spreads through our higher as well as our 
lower projects. Hence, the project principle contains 
within tiself a tendency to trust illusory hopes and to 
accept illusory successes. 

But it is equally true that there is no insurance against 
such illusions except a deliberate insurance project, 
or rather, insurance factor in our projects. An insur- 
ance factor in the projects, not of some few leaders, but of 
all who form and execute any projects whatever. The 
need of checks and restrictions upon the generality of 
mankind has been recognized for thousands of years, and 
priests, philosophers, kings, and statesmen have been 
set apart as specialists in this work. Under this scheme, 
to speak broadly rather than exactly, the characteristic 
project of the common man is to control some part of the 
forces of nature, while the project of those set apart is 
to control the common man. Latterly the chief figure 
among the guides and shepherds of men has been the 
modern capitalist. Not only has his control of the 


THE PROJECT AS THE METHOD OF NATURE 39 


means of life for the multitude carried with it corre- 
sponding control of men, but it has begotten in him a 
naive certainty that he is a competent guide for the 
masses. His naiveté is a capital example of the inherent 
tendency to illusion in the project as such. Indeed, this 
whole division of labor between the leader and the led 
is saturated with it. Even if the division should be 
found to rest upon some necessity in a historical situation, 
the necessity does not alter the character of the fact, nor 
lessen the need for relief from the remedy. In the nature 
of the case, those whose project it is to guide the masses 
overestimate their own wisdom and become victims 
even of their own virtues. They are overready to guide, 
and, having entered upon a policy, they ‘‘rationalize” 
it. On the other hand, the masses who are thus con- 
trolled, as soon as they are inured to the habit of it, 
likewise ‘‘rationalize” their situation, and therefore 
overestimate the wisdom of their guides. 

Amazing is the strength of this self-deluding drive 
within both the leaders and the led. Behold whither 
the guides of civilization have conducted us—the capital- 
ists, the statesmen, the men of science, the priests! 
Yet these men show no signs of repentance, no lack of 
confidence that the men and the principles that have 
brought us to our present tragic pass will get us out of 
it. ‘The masses, meantime, hug to themselves the thorns 
that are lacerating them. ‘‘We are uncomfortable,” they 
say, ‘‘so we will shift our position, or go a little faster in 
the’same direction; we will get out of one social class into 
another, or we will swap one political party for another.”’ 

No isolated project, no spasm of reform or series of 
such spasms, no mere revolution, no benevolence in our 


40 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


leaders, will suffice in a situation like this. For it is a 
general human-nature situation. The human nature 
that is within us must turn critically upon itself, or we 
shall be lost. We shall be lost because, in the first place, 
the enormous forces that the sciences make available are 
of such kinds, and the habits and massed sentiments the 
‘world over are of such kinds, that conflict and destruc- 
tion are in the air. They are not merely in the air; 
they are integral to the supposed wisdom of our leaders 
and to the uncritical assumptions of the led. We shall 
be lost because, in the second place, the impulses that 
have created the present conflict and destruction are 
permanent, not incidental and temporary. We have to 
wrestle with the project as a method of nature—nothing 
less than this. 

The conclusion is, first, that an essential mark—nay, 
the most clearly distinguishing mark—of educational 
projects is the purposed and habitual inclusion within 
the activities of pupils as well as teachers of free criticism 
of human life and of human nature; second, that this 
free criticism, and the action necessary to give it effect, 
are functions of all persons, not merely of those who 
(through any cause whatever) may be in positions of 
special influence. Thus, the culmination of project 
method will be a continuous project in the never-ending 
democratic re-construction of life. 


CHAPTER IV 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW IN 
THE PROJECT 


Probably no question connected with the project 
movement has created more difficulty than this: If 
the pupil is to be educated through his own purposeful 
acts, through decisions made and executed by himself, 
what is the function of the teacher? Does the project 
imply abnegation of control, or rather a more subtle 
way of “putting over” predetermined designs? Is the 
pupil to have real initiative and control, or is he merely 
to think so and be happy over it? The answer has to 
be sought in several directions. In a later chapter we 
shall see that much depends upon our conception of the 
most desirable social order, for example. But a part, 
an important part, of the answer grows directly out of 
natural laws that determine the changes that take place 
in children. The functions of the teacher are being 
settled for us by advances in our understanding of 
physiological and psychological facts. Here, at least, 
definite knowledge, rather than opinion or adherence to 
any contested social ideal, is decisive. The evidence 
for this proposition is near at hand. 

It is a historical fact that the more we study children, 
even by unprecise methods, the more we trust their 
spontaneities. An experienced leader of boys said: 
“There may be bad boys, but I have never known one.” 
Out of long experience in the junior department of the 


41 


42 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


Sunday school a trained leader and keen observer 
remarked: ‘‘I have never known a class of junior chil- 
dren to make a wrong decision after they really under- 
stood the case.”” When analysis of child life grows more 
precise, so does our confidence. We cease to think that 
we need to teach a child to walk; we slough off the super- 
stition that small children must be kept amused; we 
learn that many child impulses that we used to regard as 
troublesome are really great educational assets; we 
are convinced that in the normal child there are at 
work likewise certain checks and balances that tend to 
keep activity wholesome and to promote rest and other 
recuperative processes. From all this the inference 
appears to be direct that wherever the capacities of 
normal pupils for initiative and self-guidance are utilized, 
there control by the teacher diminishes. 

This inference is drawn from experience with nor- 
mal children under normal conditions. Abnormality, 
whether congenital or merely incidental, seems to reverse 
the rule. A disturbance of digestion can put out of 
action the appetite for wholesome food; such a disturb- 
ance can likewise prevent the social reactions upon which 
the value of school contacts largely depends. Mouth- 
breathing lessens the capacity for responses to certain 
sorts of stimuli. Chronic irritation in a bodily organ 
may obstruct organized thinking, and so render continu- 
ity of purpose in a project difficult or impossible. But 
why heap up examples? Granted that the discovery and 
correction of such defects wherever possible are functions 
of the school; granted merely that teaching must adapt 
itself to such conditions, it follows that increased scien- 
tific acquaintance with the abnormal child enlarges 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 43 


the teacher’s sphere of action and increases his control 
of the pupil. 

Now, this experience with abnormalities has reacted 
in a remarkable manner upon our whole notion of 
normality and upon our handling of it. When scien- 
tifically guided schooling was first provided for delin- 
quents and defectives, the remark was common that they 
were better looked after than normal children. Then, 
when medical examinations, school nurses, school 
dietetics, tests of intelligence, and special classes began 
to be accepted as normal parts of school administration, 
there was an awakening to the wide range of differences 
contained within the normal group. Gifted children 
were found to be suffering from educational neglect just 
as truly as children of retarded intelligence. Old 
methods of classifying pupils were found to be crude and 
even obstructive. Then, too, not all the important 
differences are comprised under the heads of physical 
health and native intelligence. Temperament, of which 
we shall probably learn something practical from the new 
studies of glandular secretions, is unquestionably a fun- 
damentally determining factor in any child’s educative 
experience. Even the cumulative effects of living in a 
given home environment, the ingrained ‘‘sets,” necessi- 
tate differentiated treatment. Facts like these have 
made some persons skeptical of the whole custom of 
teaching children in masses. After all, is not the 
“normal child” an abstraction, practically a fiction, 
being merely the middle part of a measuring stick? 
As observation broadens and deepens, ‘‘the normal 
child” and even ‘‘the child” tend to fade from living 
thought. 


44 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


The result of scientific analysis, then, is to extend 
the area of the teacher’s control, and to refine it, with 
both normal and abnormal pupils. There is less of 
vagueness, guesswork, and generality when one starts 
a thing going, and there is closer scrutiny of results. 
The schoolmaster of yesterday, who deduced his method 
from educational dogmas, and then defended the product 
on the ground that it must be good because the dogmas 
were true, made a great show of control. He was strict; 
he could keep children quiet in their seats for hours at a 
time; he could make them define an improper fraction, 
and recite fifty dates. But tnis was a relatively external 
control; it missed altogether a hundred areas, physio- 
logical and psychical, in which important reactions were 
occurring and important habits forming. Indeed, the 
degree of control that is achieved in abnormality becomes 
a standard and a guiding light for the education of chil- 
dren whose impulses are the healthiest, whose capacity 
for self-control is the greatest. Just as the dulness or 
refractoriness that nullified the teacher’s plans before 
adenoids, tonsils, and diet were attended to gave way, 
after treatment, to active docility, so the pupil of superior 
capacity who was ‘‘bad”’ simply because he needed some- 
thing to do became willingly obedient to school require- 
ments when his load was regulated by scientific knowledge 
of his strength. 

Thus, increased knowledge of normal children as 
well as abnormal has the following effects: We differ- 
entiate pupils from one another; we identify the par- 
ticular need of each under particular conditions; we 
refine and differentiate the stimuli that we employ; 
our control, becoming more refined, covers also more 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 45 


points; and so, finally, the range and the depth of the 
control exercised by the teacher increase. 

But notice, now, that this is the route whereby we 
achieve the project method. While this extension of 
the teacher’s mastery has been going on, the pupil’s 
freedom has been increasing. Not only does he feel 
fewer restraints and get along more comfortably, he 
actually initiates more of his own activities, and makes 
and executes decisions over a wider range of his conduct. 
Whether it is paradoxical or not, it is a fact that through 
one and the same process both the teacher’s control of 
the pupil and the pupil’s control of himself have increased. 

This point is so important that an example or two, 
even from commonplace experience, may not be out of 
order. Let us take, first, a change in baseball games that 
was wrought through supervision of a certain playground. 
In the old days, when the boys were left to themselves, 
they were unable to organize the game so as to make it 
run smoothly. They did not know how to deal effec- 
tively with violation of rules, unfair playing, or deception. 
Such conduct, on the part of even one boy, could cause 
friction sufficient to break up a game. But with the 
coming of a supervisor the boys acquired—voluntarily 
and gladly—ability to handle such cases, and a settled 
habit and custom of doing so. The rules were better 
understood and better enforced; the satisfaction of 
contest and of conquest was increased, while chagrin 
at defeat was lessened, and withal the boys were proud 
of their heightened ability to control themselves. 

A second example is the freeing of fettered wills by 
the teacher-controlled experience of learning how to 
study. Much of what was formerly called inattention, 


46 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


self-will, and obstinacy was really an obstructed will. 
And the teacher’s will was obstructed at the same 
point until, through analysis of the thought process, he 
learned how to free both himself and his pupils. 

It thus appears that when we are most faithful to 
the project principle, when we observe most strictly the 
conditions under which a pupil’s energies become freely 
effective, we increase, not decrease the teacher’s living 
authority. His decisions determine more of the pupil’s 
activities, and the pupil consciously leans upon the 
teacher’s wisdom more than before. Project method 
does not at all signify laissez faire. 

This suggests that a fallacy has influenced much of 
our customary thinking concerning the relation between 
the teacher’s authority and the pupil’s freedom. The 
fallacy is that freedom or control or authority is a definite 
quantum, so that, in any social situation, if one member 
of the group possesses more the others have less. So 
bound are we, Bergson might say, to space-derived 
categories even when we endeavor to think the non- 
spatial. Freedom is like joy; sharing with my friend 
may double my own portion. We deal here not with a 
mechanical law, but with a spiritual law, that is, a law 
of relations between persons. A little later we shall see 
how the same law makes possible an increase of freedom 
through obedience to the social will. At the present 
moment, when our interest is in the significance of natural 
law for the project, we may tentatively formulate the 
principle as follows: Mutual submission by teacher and 
pupil to conditions known by both to be imposed by natural 
laws tends to release the powers of both teacher and pupil, 
and thus tends to enfranchise both. 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 47 


This principle furnishes a corrective for two half- 
truths that are widely believed. The first is that the 
most educative experience is had through living one’s 
present life, not by preparing for the future. The cor- 
rection is that living one’s present life upon the basis of 
natural law not only does prepare for the future, but does 
it consciously. One might argue this upon the entirely 
general ground that foresight and prearrangement of 
one’s experience is of the inmost nature of rational 
human living. ‘To be human isto be foresighted. What 
science does is to make prevision specific and accurate, 
and the more this is done the more free we are. 
To recognize causal relations in one’s activities, as 
project method requires, is per se to prepare for future 
living. 

The other half-truth is the current assertion that 
pupils learn most effectively when they do not think 
about the fact that they are learning. This dogma 
represents, not a law of the mind, but unfortunate condi- 
tions of learning that prevailed in the old-fashioned 
school. ‘There, indeed, to be conscious that one was 
engaged in the learning process was to be reminded of 
the school or of the teacher or of schooling as something 
imposed upon one; it was to experience discomfort and 
an impulse to escape. In a situation like this there is 
undoubted gain when a pupil forgets the school, the 
teacher, and educational standards, and becomes 
absorbed in subject-matter. But the situation is pro- 
foundly reversed when school life means, not imposition 
by teacher and submission by pupil, but mutual sub- 
mission to law, or fellowship in the scientific spirit. 
Pupils who are accustomed to witness the scientific 


48 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


approach everywhere in the school, constantly learning 
why this or that measure is taken with respect to heat, 
light, ventilation, dust, colds, food, body-weight, and 
much more, easily and happily learn to look forward, 
with the teacher, to gains in the learning process. As 
underweight children ambitiously drink milk (I heard 
one of them boast that he had drunk five glasses in one 
day), watch the scales and record their gains or losses in 
avoirdupois, so also interest arises in intellectual and 
social abilities, and in the processes whereby these abili- 
ties are increased. Then we see children imposing drill 
upon themselves, and keeping a record of their own 
progress. They do not feel that the teacher assigns 
marks to them, but that nature herself does. Under 
such conditions not only instinctive curiosity, and 
enjoyment in exercising one’s powers are set free, but 
the natural desire to be a part of the world in which 
grown-ups live is indulged. It is indulged, not imita- 
tively, or parrot-like, not by concealing the difficulties 
of growth, but by facing them and ane over- 
coming them. 

When we clearly realize that through mutual sub- 
mission to natural laws the teacher’s control of pupils 
can be enlarged at the same time that their own freedom 
is increased, we may possibly pluck up courage to face 
the need of increased control of the young. There is 
truth in the frequently heard wail that the children of 
today are uncontrolled; lawless; lacking in respect for 
elders and for the past; lacking in reverence for the ideal 
and the holy; that they are subjected to too many excit- 
ing stimuli; that they are frittering away their powers 
upon worthless if not harmful pleasures; and that no 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 49 


sufficient barrier shields their minds from contamination 
from the sinful ways of adults. 

The truth in this complaint is so great and so por- 
tentous that if there were in sight no better controls than 
those of the schools of yesterday (and, for the most part, 
of today), not only would this dejected wail be justified 
but settled pessimism also. The pre-project type of 
schooling fails to meet the need because it is weak 
precisely where the deleterious influences are strong, 
namely, in invitations to self-determination. Under 
the conditions of today most pupils who during school 
hours feel that they are subject to teacher-law pass, 
after school hours, into a world of apparent freedom. 
With this outside experience of apparent freedom school 
experience of the pre-project sort cannot successfully 
compete. It cannot do so either by compulsion, or by 
appeal, or by sugar-coated indirection—the pupil cannot 
unify the two worlds. Our only rational hope is that 
we may draw educative materials and processes directly 
from the stimuli that create the problem; that is, the 
school must enter, project-fashion, into the extra-school 
experiences of the pupil. It must face with him—that 
is, lead him to face, along with the teacher—the very 
situations that make the trouble. Now, the teacher’s 
anxiety is based in part upon scientific foresight. He 
knows that this or that conduct will lead, under physio- 
logical or psychological laws, to an undesirable outcome. 
As a rule teachers do not fully share with pupils this 
scientific insight. ‘The present suggestion is that projects 
(not preaching, but projects) directed toward securing 
whatever good the out-of-school environment has to 
offer, but guided by scientific insight into causes and 


50 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


effects—projects, that is, in which teacher and pupil 
alike submit to natural law—contain our only rational 
hope for a solution of the problem that confronts us. 

This sort of approach to some community matters, 
as the use of libraries and museums, is already coming 
into vogue, and in a few instances the “movies” have 
been evaluated and improved. Why should not the 
pupil, with the teacher’s help, travel thus the entire 
round of his environment in an endeavor to find “what 
there is in it for him”? Let him subject to real tests 
wholesome and unwholesome factors, and thus let 
teacher-law be transformed into something more per- 
suasive, even clear foresight of natural-law consequences. 

Some of the points at which increased control of 
children appears to be essential may be enumerated. 
The following list is not exhaustive, but it should be 
suggestive. A few of the items are included in this 
natural-law group because of the prominence of the 
natural law of habit-formation. 


Habits of diet. 

The soda fountain. 

Habits of rest. 

Cleanliness. 

Sanitation. 

The use of stimulants and of narcotics. 

Plays and games. 

Commercialized sports, and in general the sports of adults. 

Frequency of attendance at moving-picture shows. 

Safety of moving-picture houses. Sanitary and hygienic condi- 
tions therein. 

Social conditions and influences incident to attendance at moving 
pictures. 

Character of moving pictures presented in the community. 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 5i 


Billboard advertising. 

The newspaper habit, with respect to discrimination of important 
news from unimportant, and with respect to the extent and 
the character of “comics,” sporting news, and descriptions 
of vice and crime. 

The acquisition, possession, and use of money by children and 
youth. 

The habit of “going somewhere.” Under this head I include not 
only the psychic effects of motoring as it is practiced, but also 
all the current methods of obtaining a rapid succession of 
sense stimuli. The amusement park belongs here. 

Standards of dress and of personal adornment. 

Habits and ideas connected with sex and the family. 

Gambling, both by children and by adults. 


The mutual submission of teacher and pupil to natural 
law helps to solve still other problems that concern the 
teacher’s functions and authority. The following con- 
ditions have frequently to be met: First, because of the 
rapidity and inexorableness of natural law, the teacher 
is under obligation to decide some things in advance 
of all thinking and deciding by the pupil; second, for 
similar reasons, sometimes the teacher must vigorously 
take the initiative in a project, and yet lead students to 
make it their very own; third, a part of the scientific 
truth and a part of the teacher’s purpose must sometimes 
be withheld from the pupil fora time. In the atmosphere 
of science all three of these can be done without weaken- 
ing the project attitude and habit of the pupil. 

How the matter works may be illustrated by children, 
counted as normal, who nevertheless need a new dietary 
habit or corrective muscular exercises. The number ot 
such children is far greater than was dreamed of in the 
educational philosophy of yesterday; how great it is 


82 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


will not be known until thorough pediatric and ortho- 
pedic examinations are the rule rather than, as now, 
the exception. 

Let us take, first, the overactive, underweight, and 
undersize child who tends toward nervousness. His 
name is legion, and he is frequently found among those 
whose IQ is high. He is not sick or deformed; he needs 
neither medicine nor surgery; his is a case for education. 
Therefore, he is led to compare his weight with a scale 
of normal age-weights; the weight-producing foods are 
explained, and he is led into the project of increasing 
his weight. Nothing is said about his being undersize, 
lest a sense of inferiority should arise. Next, on the 
playground the supervisor, with the least possible show 
of control, sees to it that this child, in any game that is 
played, has one of the less strenuous parts. Yet it is 
found experimentally that even very ambitious boys, 
once they have adopted the project of increasing their 
weight, will submit to rigorous prohibitions with every 
appearance of conviction. 

A similar attitude can be developed in children who 
need exercises that will correct faults of posture and 
carriage. The girl referred to in the first chapter 
is an example. Her school is one in which, because 
scientific care in such matters is an established and 
fully understood part of the administration, the pupils 
themselves get the spirit of it. The teachers, for their 
part, say little about defects, but much about gains and 
conquests, and as far as practicable they devise games 
or contests of appropriate sorts instead of formal gym- 
nastics. Hence we see the pupils, with jolly enthusiasm, 
taking as their own the teacher’s project-in-general; 


NATURAL LAW AND TEACHER-LAW 53 


we see this general project dividing and subdividing, 
every part having meaning for the pupils, but not neces- 
sarily the whole meaning that the teacher has in mind; 
and in every part we witness an intelligent leaning upon 
the wisdom of the physical director. This leaning 
deserves careful scrutiny. It is not subservience to 
authority in the fashion of the schools of yesterday; 
it is not blind attachment to an attractive personality; 
it is the acceptance of guidance by science recognized 
as such. It reaches its maximum when the pupils 
realize that the director himself is not subservient to a 
mere tradition or custom, but is studying, learning, and 
modifying his own procedures in response to increasing 
scientific insight. 

When natural law, apprehended by scientific pro- 
cesses, becomes a pervasive factor in the school conscious- 
ness, a guide in the whole ongoing of the school and not 
merely something that is studied in classes in “‘science,”’ 
it acts as a bond of union between the personalities 
involved, a bond between pupil and pupil, and between 
pupil and teacher. Then the whole school experience 
tends to assume the project character, and in the process, 
though what has been known as the teacher’s “authority” 
wanes, his prevision and real control increase just as the 
pupil’s prevision and real control also increase. 


CHAPTER V 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND THE 
WILL OF SOCIETY 


The project principle asserts that the educative 
process goes forward with the greatest power where the 
pupil forms and executes purposes of his very own. 
When, then, is one’s will one’s very own? Was the 
purpose of Jean Valjean his own, or that of his masters, 
when, a convict slave, his muscles strained at the oars 
of the galley? Was the purpose of Othello his own, or 
Iago’s? When the Roman rabble,.excited by Antony’s 
speech, made up what it thought was its own mind, and 
proceeded to work what it thought was its own will, did 
it really work its own will or that of another? When an 
American citizen enters a polling booth and secretly 
marks a ballot as he will, how far does he himself deter- 
mine how he shall mark it, and how far is he an instru- 
ment of a party or of a class in society? When a teacher, 
with canny forethought, places illustrated story books 
within the reach of young children, and reads samples of 
the stories to show what is inside the books, whose will 
really determines matters when the children, at their 
own request, are permitted to learn to read? When a 
history project, or a civics project eventuates in an 
enthusiastic conviction that ours is “‘the best govern- 
ment on earth,” who does the real thinking in the case? 

How much, then, do we really say, and what do we 
precisely mean, when we advocate education of the 


54 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 55 


young through decisions that they themselves make and 
execute? Even when I am under compulsion my act 
may be in some sense my own, and when I am least 
restrained my decision may be less mine than that of 
surrounding persons. A part of the answer to this 
question has been given by Professor Kilpatrick in his 
analysis of the difference between choosing a painful 
thing because the alternative is still more painful, and 
choosing something that is not only relatively satisfying, 
but inherently so. The difference (educationally) is in 
the concomitant learning and in the mind-sets that are 
produced. <A child who, being given the alternatives of 
learning the multiplication table or taking a whipping, 
decides in favor of arithmetic, and carries out his de- 
cision, may learn the multiplication table, but he is likely 
to learn likewise habits of evasion, and of overvaluation 
of appearances and of teachers’ marks, and he is likely 
to acquire mind-sets against mathematics, the teacher, 
and even schooling as a whole. Obviously the con- 
comitant learning and the mind-sets are likely to be far 
better when one encounters multiplication as an invita- 
tion to an inherently satisfying activity. Hence, the 
project principle certainly implies an intention on the 
teacher’s part to avoid compulsion of pupils. 

Yet compulsion of the individual by society is a 
fact that somehow must be faced. The parent is com- 
pelled to pay taxes, to obey the sanitary code, and to 
obtain a license before he runs a motor car. The 
teacher himself is compelled to do disagreeable things, 
such as making out reports. We know of no way to 
dispense with compulsion as one of the bonds that hold 
us adults together in society. And of course authorita- 


56 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


tive command, both to do and not to do—reduce it as 
much as we possibly can—must be held in reserve for 
emergency use in the protection of children from evils 
that they do not appreciate. What, then, does the 
project principle imply at these points? 

What does it mean, too, in the innumerable positive 
matters that require of the teacher a degree of foresight 
and of prearrangement of which his pupils are incapable ? 
How can one teach at all without selecting, in advance of 
all pupil decisions, the general direction in which pupils 
are to move, and in many instances even the specific 
acts that an individual should be led, of his own volition, 
to perform? A convenient, example of such specific 
acts is the use of a toothbrush. ‘This is not compulsion, 
but itis control. The pupils make their own decisions and 
execute them, yet within these decisions there are opera- 
tive prior decisions of society acting through the school. 

Such situations in the school are not only not excep- 
tional, they represent a general principle of social 
psychology. The will of an individual never is and never 
can be disengaged from the encompassing and permeat- 
ing will of his fellows. ‘The mere individual, it has been 
remarked, is an abstraction. ‘The evidence for this 
paradox is found alike in the processes of the adult mind 
and in the movement whereby, out of the selflessness of 
the new-born, there emerges an individual self. This 
evidence cannot here be given, but parts of it are easily 
illustrated. It is easy to see that each of us tends to 
reflect, even in innermost thought and feeling, the age 
and the society in which he has his being. Even when 
we have no intention of influencing another, and no 
notion that we are being influenced, we do mutually form 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 57 


one another’s opinions, likes, dislikes, purposes, char- 
acter. What sort of domestic architecture do you 
most like? Your reply, ten chances to one, reflects a 
current mass-liking expressed in the style of the time. 
The writer of these words recalls a whole procession of 
styles—of popular likes—from Mansard roofs and Queen 
Anne fronts through Dutch colonial, New England 
colonial, and German timbered stucco to the present 
hug-the-ground types. Why does the poetry of the 
Victorian era, that once seemed to us all-alive, now sound 
to us so like the hollowness of a dried seashell? Is it 
not that we have been carried along, without individual 
foresight, in a common current of life? Our political, 
moral, and religious attitudes and convictions, likewise, 
go in waves; they are principally mass movements. 
They represent periods, peoples, and minor groups. 
They are not, on the whole, aggregations of privately- 
arrived-at conclusions. Most of us for the most part 
simply ‘‘belong.”? Yes, science itself exhibits waves of 
mass interest, points of view, favorite problems and 
methods. The scientific man never is alone with the 
objects that he investigates, for “science” goes with 
him into field and laboratory. To our innermost core 
we are in and of groups, larger and smaller; in and of 
institutions and customs; in and of imitative or co- 
operative occupational, political, scientific, ethical, and 
religious thinking and doing. We grow up to be persons 
in no other manner. Not only does our early environ- 
ment of persons give us many of our permanent sets; 
a baby achieves the human type of mind at all only by 
interplay with others of his species. Personality itself 
is a social fact. 


59 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


We are faced by ambiguity, consequently, in the 
concept of the project. For what a pupil does, even 
when he is most individual and self-guided, is wrought 
in him as well as by him. It is wrought in him, first, 
by the immediate school environment. The school 
exists, not as his device, not even by his sufferance; 
and his presence there is determined by a joint willing. 
The will of the state, the will of his family, the sentiment 
of his social class, the standards of his prospective occu- 
pation—one or more of these work within him, whether 
or not he willingly co-operates with them. His fellow- 
pupils, too, are not of his selection; yet they enter 
intimately into his attitudes, decisions, and activities 
of every sort. The teachers are not appointed by him, 
and their policies antedate all his projects; yet the 
teachers, too, whatever their methods, participate in his 
inmost activity. 

Moreover, teacher and pupil together are under con- 
stant pressure from out-of-school forces. Part of this 
pressure takes the form of school laws and ordinances 
and administrative policies. Trace the history of the 
selection of a site for a school, the laying-out of the 
grounds, the choice of an architect, the ideas that deter- 
mine the plans of the building, the making of the budget, 
the levying of school taxes, the election of a superintend- 
ent, yes, the employment of a janitor—trace this through, 
with the pupils of the school in your mind’s eye, and you 
shall see the social will entering into the pupil’s will, 
now as a rising sun of aspiration, and now as the nar- 
rowing, the choking, the distortion of a personality. 
What, then, does this imply with respect to the project 
method ? 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 59 


The community acts within the teacher and the pupil 
not only thus by laws, ordinances, and official adminis- 
tration, but also in many subtler ways. A varied 
terminology bears witness to unofficial, often undefined 
and unrecognized, forces that work within our wills 
partly by reasoning, partly by persuasion, but still more 
by suggestion. Consider the fact back of each of these 
terms: public opinion; public sentiment; the spirit of 
a people or of a nation; the spirit of the times; na- 
tional destiny; race destiny; class-consciousness; race- 
prejudice; up to date; respectability; success; ‘‘ good 
fellow”; being in the game; ‘‘he-man”’; “red-blooded”’; 
“red”; ‘100 per cent American”; practical; common 
sense; humanity; “a square deal’; foreigner,.... 
but why prolong the list? Here are—not abstractions 
or speculative entities, but—living forces that circulate 
in the pupil’s most individual feeling, thinking, and 
acting. They act as assumptions, or predeterminants, 
and they are all the more effective for this reason. They 
are effective, too, not only as determinants of this or 
that immediate product, but likewise in the deeply 
educative way of producing mind-sets, or channels within 
which one’s energies shall hereafter flow. 

The interlocking of such assumptions, too, is extensive 
and important, for it results in supporting one assumption 
by another. Consider, for example, the unexpressed 
social urge that surrounds and penetrates the child’s 
mind with respect to the possession, the use, and the 
acquisition of money. Like the roots of a pine tree, this 
urge pushes far out in many directions, and far down. 
It controls to a large degree the child’s notions and 
attitudes with respect to power—what one wants, and 


60 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


how to get it; labor; success; social classes; various 
personal habits; law and justice. ‘These are not mere 
notions, let it be remembered, nor yet passing interests 
like fondness for a toy, but permanent impulsions from 
society that enter cumulatively into a large proportion 
of the pupil’s real projects. 

In every school project, then, society and the pupil 
jointly purpose and jointly produce whatever is produced 
—most of all the part of the product that remains as a 
permanent residuum. ‘The project method does not at 
all get rid of the duality of factors that teachers have 
recognized and struggled about since the beginning of 
formal education. But a change in the relation of the 
two certainly occurs when we wholeheartedly adopt this 
method. What is this change? Is it an alteration in 
pupils’ attitudes and procedures, the social or extra- 
school factor remaining the same, or do both factors 
undergo complementary modifications? Certainly the 
teacher who makes the shift undergoes a marked trans- 
formation, not least at the points where he most precisely 
represents the authority of society, as in discipline. 
Between pupil and teacher, at least, a new type of joint 
willing is born. What we need to know, accordingly, is 
whether the changed policy on the teacher’s part is merely 
a new tool for bringing the pupil into accord with the 
same old social forces. Is the project merely a subtler 
mode of conforming the pupil to a predetermined social 
model, or is the new method, as to the pupil it appears to 
be, a sincere, uncamouflaged presentation of social reality ? 

Probably the very first point at which an answer to 
this question should be had is the relation of the second- 
ary school to the elementary school, and the second, the 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 61 


relation of the college to the secondary school. If 
life in its reality is sincerely presented to children in 
elementary projects—the method of living together and 
learning together, on the one hand, and what to live for, 
on the other—then what should be the significance for 
him and for society of his entrance into the secondary 
school? When I witness the vitality, the social reality, 
and the perspective of various school projects of young 
children, and then see high-school pupils poring for 
hours every evening over assigned lessons, not because 
they are in themselves important, but because one’s 
standing in class is at stake, I cannot repress a feeling 
of injustice. ‘‘What studies do you have?” I asked of 
a high-school pupil. ‘The various subjects were named. 
Picking out one of them, I said, ‘‘Why do you study it ?”’ 
“Because it’s required for graduation in my course,”’ 
was the reply. ‘‘But why is it required ?”’ I persisted. 
“T do not know!” said the victim. The high-school 
pupil is likely to be loyal to such tasks, yes; and such 
devotion never goes altogether unrewarded. Never- 
theless, moving up from the grades into the high school 
should not mean a narrower freedom, a narrower co-opera- 
tion, a contracted measure for life’s values. Already 
there is felt in our best elementary schools the embarrass- 
ment of a duality of principles in the educational system. 
Similarly, the secondary schools that deal most vitally 
with the life of the community have long felt that the 
movement of the student toward and into the college 
is a movement toward and into the relatively abstract. 

This is not the place to discuss the function of the 
high school in the community, nor yet the overwhelming 
problem of the general purposelessness that pervades 


62 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


the colleges, but one may venture the assertion that there 
is nothing greater in the kingdom of education today than 
children who confidingly take project teaching at its 
face value as representing real life. The sincerity of 
society in its encouragement of this attitude will be 
proved at some cost, however, and first of all in the 
reconstruction of secondary and higher education. 

Our discussion has brought us within sight of three 
points that concern the relation of the project to the 
pupil’s will, on the one hand, and to the will of society, 
on the other. First, within school projects there re- 
mains, and always must remain, a factor of compulsion. 
Second, even within the most completely voluntary 
activities of pupils in their school projects, society still 
exercises broad control; it wills within the pupil’s willing. 
Third, this joint willing, which is of the essence of the 
project, implies (if we value sincerity) a two-sided, not 
merely a one-sided, plasticity. As the pupil finds his 
way by the help of the social will as expressed in school 
organization and method, so society finds its way by the 
help of the pupil’s experience as he knows and judges it in 
his projects. Thus, at one and the same point the pupil 
and society make experiments in living; both submit their 
case to the test of a changing and enlarging experience 
that is mutually initiated and mutually judged. 

We have come within sight of this third point, but 
the evidence for it thus far is drawn from the presumption 
that the school, as an organ of society, is sincere when it 
invites the pupil to find what is true and good through 
his own voluntary activities. We need not rest the case 
here, however. One can safely venture the assertion 
that the teachers who have consistently pursued the 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 63 


project method have themselves learned something 
thereby as to how to live, and especially how to live 
together. Certainly, this is the drift of what one hears. 
It is rather fascinating, in fact, as it surely is new, to 
hear teachers boasting that they are learning at least 
as much as their pupils. Again, times uncounted pupils’ 
projects have been a tonic for the will of the community, 
of public officials, and of parents. Farming has been 
improved; so has housekeeping; sanitation and hygiene 
have been extended; fire hazards have been lessened; 
parks and playgrounds have been provided; immigrants 
have been induced to become citizens—all because fresh 
young minds, with time for thinking, and unhampered by 
conventionalities, went straight toward some of the simple 
essentials of living, and their elders took them seriously. 

What will happen when other fresh young minds, for 
a generation or two, proceed to get acquainted with a 
hundred other adult ways of doing things? One does 
not dream wildly who foresees many a social change 
coming to pass because the eyes of children peer into 
our police stations, our jails and prisons, courts, charitable 
and correctional institutions, taxation and budgets, 
industrial conditions, welfare legislation, even inter- 
national relations. When Jesus said that in order to 
enter into the greatest things in life one must become as 
a little child, he uttered a truth so greatly simple that it 
required generations and generations for men to begin 
to see the sweep of its meaning. It is literally true that 
adults go on century after century inflicting upon them- 
selves and their offspring losses and hurts and injustices 
that could be avoided by adding the simple wisdom of 
children to that of parents and teachers. 


64 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


The churches will get better acquainted with their 
Master when they heed his words about children. Not 
long ago some Sunday-school pupils were led into the 
project of participating with the congregation in the 
Sunday-morning worship. Worship was studied and 
planned for, and the children entered the sanctuary 
ready to make reverent response to everything, from the 
first note of the organ voluntary. But adults whispered 
during the voluntary, and people came in late, to the 
distress of the children. When the fact that their 
worship had been thus interfered with was communi- 
cated to the church society, a reform of adult practices 
was inaugurated. Just so, who can measure the new 
energies of many sorts that will flow through the churches 
when “‘a little child shall lead them”? What dropping 
of cumbersome paraphernalia! What emancipation 
from institutionalism! What simplification of purpose, 
and what directness and wholeheartedness of aim! 
What unification of forces that are now divided 
over purely adult differences! The project in reli- 
gious education—the project as a mutually sincere 
joint willing on the part of children and adults— 
may well prove to be the means of salvation for the 
churches. 

Co-operative willing, then, is of the essence of the 
project, and co-operative willing implies renunciation of 
arbitrariness on all sides. ‘This conception vacates the 
criticism that the project principle, implying reduction 
of the ‘Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots,’ must 
result in individual self-seeking. We should violate 
the principle itself if, mistaking the nature of indi- 
viduality, we encouraged any child to think that he can 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 65 


have his own way by anything short of co-operation. 
To take the individualistic road is not to achieve inde- 
pendence of thought or of choice, but only a different set 
of dependences—usually dependence upon a careless, 
reckless, partisan, or (as often occurs) a tyrannical group 
opinion, and slavery to the purveyors of selfish satis- 
factions. 

Now, the only known guaranty against the develop- 
ment of arbitrariness is experience of the co-operative 
spirit in other persons. Compulsion may wear out this 
or that impulse, and at such a point it may produce 
passive conformity, to be sure, but whatever of self 
remains is still untrained. Is any sort of arbitrariness 
more disagreeable than that of a thoroughly institu- 
tionalized mind? Criticism of the method of pupil 
freedom from the standpoint of the school of yesterday, 
therefore, is pecularly malapropos. It is amazing, in 
fact, that teachers ever imagined that arbitrariness and 
self-seeking are best prevented by what, to the pupil’s 
experience, seems to be an exercise of arbitrariness on the 
part of others. 

We need to dig deeper than we usually do about the 
two difficulties that seem to call for exceptions to the 
project principle. In the first place, the danger of arbi- 
trary, self-seeking, or partisan use of freedom by the 
pupil cannot be met by a policy of abridging his freedom, 
but only by a policy of increasing his freedom by extend- 
ing the range of his self-expression through co-operation. 
We teachers need, too, to be more objective in our 
thinking concerning our competence, and the competence 
of adult society, to assume the rdle of infallible guide. 
Who that contemplates the condition of humanity all 


66 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


over the world today can fail to see that our traditional 
assumption of authority over children in the interest of 
adult standards and adult ways of doing things needs 
revision ?* In the second place, we should not hastily 
assume that the necessity of compulsion by society 
involves exceptions to the project principle. We should 
rather explore a little farther the implications of the 
necessarily social nature of individuality itself. It will 
appear, I think, that what is called for is not exceptions 
but a thorough carrying-out of the project process itself 
as genuine, two-sided, co-operative thinking and willing, 
with all the reciprocal judgments, on both sides, to which 
this leads. 

Let us see whither this principle will lead us. It will 
certainly require us to give the same kind of respect to 
the personality of a child that we give to that of a grown- 
up. Not indulgence, or coddling, or concealment of 
reality; not the building-up of a separate child-world 
that will later meet disillusionment; not two contra- 
dictory modes of social organization—democracy for 
adults and sugar-coated autocracy for children—but the 
very same processes (graded, of course, to children’s 
growing capacity) of social recognition, mutual adjust- 
ment, and mutual control. This implies that, just as 
society, acting through the teacher, exercises rights of 
selection that the pupils may not override, so the pupils, 
on their side, have rights of selection that society, acting 
through the school, may not abridge. It implies, like- 
wise, that, as the judgment of society, expressed through 
the teacher, approves and condemns processes and prod- 
ucts, and requires revisions, so, likewise, the pupils 

* Cf. p. 30. 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 67 


approve and condemn society as it is, call for revisions, 
and have effective ways of making their judgment upon 
society count. Is not this, indeed, just what has hap- 
pened repeatedly where the project method has brought 
pupil will and social will face to face, as in matters of 
sanitation and parks and playgrounds? 

If we do thus include in the concept of the project a 
full realization that ‘‘real-life situations”? educate in 
living better than miniature, or invented, or merely 
symbolical situations, we shall in the end commit our- 
selves to the principle that children should participate 
in the control of society in the large in the same sense 
and by the same methods (though not to the same 
degree) as adults. If in the project the choosing and 
executing are genuinely reciprocal as between the pupil 
and society (as represented by the school), then neither 
party may claim any complete exemption from the judg- 
ment of the other. Both parties must possess authority 
in the same sense. 

The ways in which social control is wielded are vari- 
ous. One of them is “talking matters over.” Many 
a teacher learned this long before “‘project”’ had a place 
in the technical terminology of teaching. What is now 
necessary is to be ready and willing to change sides in 
such “talking over.”” We must make it easy and natural 
for pupils, of their own initiative, to say what they 
find satisfactory and unsatisfactory in the school, in the 
home, in the church, and in society at large. “Talk 
it over” with the teacher, the principal, the superintend- 
ent, the school board. It ought to be a natural and 
expected occurrence for school children to take their 
judgments before the board of education. What recip- 


63 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


rocal illumination would result, and what increased and 
improved purposefulness all around. 

Let us consider for a moment how unnatural and 
wasteful our present situation is in this respect. From 
the old, repressive theory of training we have inherited 
the almost universal, but deadening, opinion that schools 
and schooling as such cannot be vitally willed by pupils. 
It is high time to recognize the evil lineage of this notion, 
and likewise to see the implications of the rapidly 
amassing instances of self-schooling, even in such difficult 
matters as formal drill Here—to touch upon another 
type—is a boy who, in order to overcome a habit of 
“crabbing” or ‘knocking,’ willingly keeps upon his 
person a device for reminding himself and recording his 
slips. Other children, learning of the project, came to 
the teacher to ask for similar devices to help them over- 
come other social faults in themselves. It is astonishing 
how little use schools have made of children’s aspiration 
to grow up. Astonishing, too, is our slowness to perceive 
how often the very simplicity and unconventionality 
of the child’s mind enables it to go straight to the heart 
of large problems. When pupils once get into the way of 
easily and comfortably “talking it over” with school 
authorities, not only will schools become a mutual 
project of children and adults, but indefinite improvement 
will follow. Why, indeed, should not pupils have some 
part in staff meetings? What a satire upon our educa- 
tion in and for democracy is the college faculty meeting 
in which the students, many of them possessing the fran- 
chise of the state, have no part or lot! 

This principle applies to all the relations of pupil 
to society. ‘Talk it over” with the policeman, the 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 69 


chief of police, the police judge, your alderman, your 
mayor, your representatives in legislature and congress, 
your governor, your president. None of them can get 
into “the kingdom” of good, responsible government 
until they become as little children. ‘‘Talk it over”’ 
with parents, Sunday-school teacher, superintendent, 
pastor. They, too, have no other road into the kingdom 
of the spirit. 

Another method of social control is publicity. That 
evils thrive so much better in the dark than in the light 
is complimentary to human nature. Often all that is 
necessary in order to secure appropriate action is to get 
a fact before people’s minds, and hold it there. But 
here a distinction is necessary. We have fallen upon a 
time when making public opinion is a technical manu- 
facturing process as truly as making a chair. Govern- 
ments, political parties, economic groups, and adver- 
tisers vie with one another in the use of psychological 
laws in such a way as to do people’s thinking for them 
when they suppose that they are doing their own think- 
ing. ‘This is propaganda in an evil sense; it is funda- 
mentally undemocratic, and in the end it becomes im- 
moral. Entirely different is the employment of scientific 
method in the ascertainment of fact, and publicity for 
both fact and method. Participation of pupils in 
publicity work of this sort has already yielded splendia 
results, as in sanitation. Now, what pupils have done 
in the matter of flies as disease carriers points the way to 
other public service. Let them once form the habit 
of making public any facts whatsoever that they regard 
as socially important—facts concerning the school, 
public health, charities, government, industry, living 


70 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


conditions, morals, religion—and we shall have better 
schools and better community living as a result. And 
not merely facts that reveal defects. Understanding the 
community’s strong points, and reasonable pride in them, 
is indispensable to sound social judgment and to the 
correction of faults. 

Is there, indeed, any sort of social control that ought 
to be completely withheld from school children? No; 
the road upon which the project principle has started 
us will lead at last to pupil participation in government in 
the sense of political rights the same in kind, though not 
in degree, as those possessed by their parents and 
teachers. At present, though our political philosophy 
declares that there is no just government without the 
consent of the governed, all minors are ruled without 
their consent, even in matters that are universally recog- 
nized as within their capacity. Degrees of capacity to 
govern are utterly unrecognized in our constitutional law. 
In a single instant, when the hands of the clock touch 
the midnight hour, our young people pass from zero right 
of franchise to maximum right. 

The scheme is almost incredibly crude. It is in no 
wise geared into our educational system. The state 
trains its children for citizenship for eight years in the 
elementary school, then for four years in the high school, 
and often for four years more in the college—irains them 
for citizenship—yet at no point in the process does the 
state satisfy itself, or certify to pupil or parent, whether 
or not any degree of competence as a citizen has been 
achieved. Graduation from the course of study pre- 
scribed by the state is not graduation into any function 
or right of the citizen whatsoever. Yet we wonder why 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 71 


adolescents show so little sense of social responsibility, 
so little respect for law, and why educated Americans 
do not feel the weighty import of the ballot! 

Many an effort to fill this gap has been made, it is 
true. Witness the various schemes of so-called self- 
government, especially those that imitate the municipal, 
the state, or the national structure. That valuable social 
experience has been had through these and other modes 
of pupil control, no one will question. But they are 
inadequate. Most persons who think about the prob- 
lem at all would agree, without doubt, that the only 
really good school government is that in which the 
pupils themselves achieve reflective, social self-control, 
and that training for democracy must be, in the nature 
of the case, training 7m democracy. Yet, under our 
present laws, every scheme of pupil self-government 
is inevitably infected with a certain untruth. For pupils 
have no right to self-government; they are merely 
permitted to run their own affairs by a teacher, a 
principal, or a superintendent who, as far as pupil self- 
government is concerned, is an irresponsible ruler. His 
whim may inaugurate it, or keep it out altogether; may 
determine its specific form; may nullify its acts, or 
abolish it without redress. A shift in the school staff 
may dislocate a whole social system in the school. Under 
such conditions the pupils, whatever the form of school 
government, do not get an experience of citizenship, 
but of an imitated, more or less artificial, substitute for 
it. Such substitutes, let me repeat, have undoubted 
value. To “‘get the hang” of holding meetings, electing 
officers and holding office, serving on committees, and 
thinking in group terms is not a small matter. But the 


72 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


citizen’s experience of being the source of law at the 
same time that he is subject to it, the experience of 
wielding a share of genuine sovereignty, is lacking. ‘The 
pupils know this, of course. To them, citizenship is 
off yonder as yet; it will arrive of itself when the clock 
strikes the hour; meantime their self-government is 
poised in unstable equilibrium between reality and make- 
believe. 

What will the project principle do with a situation 
like this? It certainly will not give a dogmatic answer, 
nor offer a cut-and-dried program of reconstruction. 
But it surely will move forward, by cautious experi- 
mentation, in the direction of its own plain implications. 
First, the capacities of children for governing will be 
determined and graded by projects that place the maxi- 
mum rather than the minimum of discretion in their 
hands in “real-life situations.” Second, teachers and 
pupils together will then, by “talking it over” and 
publicity, show the school board and the voters (or, 
in the case of the church, the church board and the church 
members) the meaning and the advantages of incorpor- 
ating pupil self-government (or, better, school self- 
government, for the teacher will always be included in 
vital projects in this field) into the official regulations 
of the board. Then, for the first time, the teacher, 
principal, and superintendent will abnegate their pre- 
rogative of arbitrariness, and for the first time the 
project method will become the method of a school board. 
Third, further experiment, on this new level, doubtless 
with many a miss as well as some hits, will lead finally to 
the project of incorporating the scheme into the statutes 
of the state and at last into the constitution too. 


THE WILL OF THE PUPIL AND SOCIETY 73 


Some apparently essential features of such real 
self-government are as follows: First, it will be, not an 
optional privilege (a right without a duty), but, in broad 
outline, a legal obligation upon both teacher and pupil. 
Second, wide discretion and room for local adaptation 
will be guarded, but machinery for enforcement will be 
provided (a new type of juvenile court being included), 
so that dereliction by either teacher or pupil can be 
corrected at the instigation of anyone inside the school 
or outside it. Third, filling one’s place successfully at 
any grade will lead to promotion to more rights and 
responsibilities, and at a definite point the successful 
self-governor will graduate into the full franchise of the 
state. 

Early in this chapter the question was asked, At 
points where compulsion of the pupil is necessary, what 
does the project principle signify? We now have the 
answer: Place the necessary compulsion in a system in 
which everyone both exercises compulsion upon every- 
one and submits to compulsion from everyone, and let 
the particular experience be seen in its relation to the 
whole. You then have the conditions of a possible 
loyalty to what is disagreeable, a possible project that 
plainly and openly includes being compelled. 


CHAPTER VI 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE 
MORAL LAW 


In the last chapter we reached the conclusion that 
social education, if it is to be well-rounded, must include 
—not merely as a goal, but also as a living part of the 
educative process—the experience of governing as well 
as of being governed, ‘‘governing” being here used in 
the full sense of political society. This brings us to the 
related problem, not less delicate and difficult, of the 
relation of moral law, the ‘‘oughts and ought nots,” 
to the freedom and vitality of the project. Is the pupil 
to be merely subjected to certain moral laws which the 
school authorities formulate, or is he to have a part in 
the creation of moral standards themselves? Is moral 
evolution to go forward in and through the project 
experience of the young, and if so, by what methods of 
teaching? ‘These problems require the discussion of 
three questions, namely: 

I. How does moral law become a control in the con- 
duct and the projects of the young? The question is 
not, What control ought moral law to have? nor yet, 
What steps shall we take to give it increased control ? 
but, What is the actual mechanism of control ? 

II. What is the relation of this process, now occurring 
in the young, to the process of moral transmission and 
moral evolution in society at large? In particular, 
what is the actual relation of the school to society in 
respect to morals? 

74 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 75 


III. What light do the answers to I and II cast upon 
the problem of method in moral education ? 

The first of these questions will be discussed in the 
present chapter, the remaining two in the chapter that 
is to follow. 

I 

1. The young encounter moral law, first of all, in 
the customs, or settled modes of action, of some group— 
a family, a play-group, children’s parties, a school, a 
church, a city, a business community, and so on. The 
way in which anything is regularly or statedly done 
without protest in any group with which a child is 
associated is assumed to be the way this thing ought to 
be done. The remark is often heard that small children 
are ritualists, and innumerable tales are told of how they 
scrupulously reproduce in themselves, in their dolls, and 
if possible in their pet animals, some precise act that to 
them represents social reality. A pathetic phase of this 
process, often revealed when children play being father 
or mother, is the acceptance of parental arbitrariness and 
even cruelty as the to-be-expected, and therefore proper, 
conduct of a parent. 

The psychology of this response to groups leads us 
into some of the profoundest aspects of child experience. 
The small child’s problem (not analyzed by himself, of 
course) is to obtain some definite, reliable points of 
reference—items that ‘“‘stay put’’—1in a mass of experi- 
ences that are so largely strange to him, and so uncon- 
trollable. Only as he discovers things that meet expecta- 
tions can he be a self or have a meaningful world. His 
name is such a fixed phase of himself; so are the ways 
of doing things that are already habitual with him; in 


76 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


this small, familiar area he can feel himself as himself. 
So he clings to these things as matters of what we call 
the merest justice. Just so, that which can be relied 
upon in others; that which brings a sense of familiarity 
at each meeting with a person, hence repetition, is what 
makes his social world at all manageable in thought, or 
feeling, or conduct. If, when I retell a familiar story, I 
change a single word, I must be corrected—the story 
“ought” to be told just so. “‘Oughts and ought nots” 
like this, expressive of insistent expectation, are means 
whereby the child has any articulate world at all. Added 
to this are the instinctive social satisfactions that accom- 
pany the fulfilment of social expectations, likewise the 
satisfaction of making things happen according to expec- 
tation. ‘The whole process gives rise to an imperative 
feeling that the established social way is the “‘right” way, 
and that this or that ‘‘ought” or ‘‘ought not”’ to be done. 

We by no means outgrow this mental procedure when 
we leave childhood behind. Adults also approve and 
condemn—wmorally approve and condemn—upon the 
basis of familiarity and non-familiarity. If all the 
women we had ever known had always kept their faces 
veiled in the presence of men other than their husbands, 
the sight of an unveiled female face would give the same 
moral shock that it used to give the Turks. Many 
persons gave an ethical shudder when our women 
began to wear ankle-high skirts, but the shock, with its 
moral quality, faded away when such costumes became 
familiar sights. ‘The way in which we are even beginning 
to take “knickers”? for granted as an appropriate cos- 
tume for women reminds me of a conversation in which, 
about twenty-five years ago, when women were riding 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 77 


bicycles, a professor of theology confided to me his 
conviction that the modesty of women was on the decline 
—otherwise, how could they bear to wear bloomers! 

If each of us should make a catalogue of his own 
habitual moral approvals and condemnations, and 
then check those that obviously rest chiefly upon habitual 
expectation (or, in some instances, mere mode of defin- 
ing), most of us would be surprised, and many of us 
would be less cock-sure than we are concerning the 
depth of our morality. Such a catalogue might well 
begin with the proper relations of the female in the 
family and in society at large, for this is an area in which 
we are waking up and making fresh moral discrimina- 
tions. We might then go on to consider our convictions 
as to the moral inferiority of peoples unfamiliar to us. 
Perhaps important moral differences between peoples 
do exist, but we do not wait for the proof of it, for we 
judge upon the basis of unfamiliarity. Just so, the 
ethics of an occupation represent chiefly the way in which 
it actually is carried on. ‘‘What’s wrong with it? 
We’ve always done it.”” As far as I have been able to 
ascertain, no church ever tries a minister for heresy 
because he teaches an outworn doctrine; the heretic, 
the wrongdoer, is always the one who says the unexpected 
or unconventional thing. 

The point now to be noted is that, in the child’s 
consciousness, whatever is conventional tends to be 
taken as the ‘“‘right”’ and the “‘ought-to-be.” Now, this 
is moral experience—not the whole of it, of course, but— 
genuine moral experience, not a mere accompaniment 
or adjunct thereof. We deceive ourselves and misunder- 
stand children if we assume the contrary. 


78 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


2. The second point at which children encounter and 
assimilate moral law is approvals and disapprovals of 
conduct, to which in many cases there are added rewards 
and especially punishments. Every child has much 
experience of being approved and disapproved; more- 
over, everyone lives constantly in the presence of judg- 
ments upon others. Apparently children have a pecu- 
liarly deep interest in penalties, whether at home, in 
the school, in the state’s prison, or in fairyland. To be 
on the safe side one’s self describes a part of the interest 
here, but beyond this is a spontaneous liking for the law- 
and-penalty category for both thought and imagina- 
tion. I once invented a story that appeared to be the 
tale of a deep crime, but at the crucial point, where the 
supposedly guilty party was apparently to be exposed, 
I turned the tragedy into a joke by accounting for the 
whole action on the basis of a misunderstanding of a 
trivial circumstance. A twelve-year-old lad who had 
become absorbed in the story turned on me almost 
savagely and insisted that I give a different ending to it; 
somebody, he said, ought to be punished. He saw the 
point of the joke clearly enough, but his imagination 
was living among relations that adults count as ethical. 

Exceedingly broad is the area of approvals and dis- 
approvals of which children are witnesses, and deep is 
the effect. Whatever the social judgment that prevails 
in a child’s environment approves or condemns may 
become an item in his moral consciousness. ‘Thus he 
acquires moral attitudes toward individuals, parties 
and classes, institutions, policies, acts, motives, types of 
character. His thinking labels each of them with one 
or other of the two ethical tags in his possession, good and 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 79 


bad. He may not reason why at all, and when he does 
reason he is most likely to reproduce items of adult talk 
that he has happened to hear. So seriously, so morally, 
does he take his actual social environment. It is scarcely 
necessary to ask whether, in this matter, his moral life 
is markedly different, as respects the process, from that 
of adults. 

3. Since most children have contacts with more than 
one group, each of which serves as a moral authority, 
children’s moral judgments are really groups or sets of 
judgments that may or may not be coherent with one 
another. There is considerable evidence not only that 
these sets of judgments, or codes. commonly conflict 
with one another, but also that they have different 
degrees of reality for the children who hold them. A 
gang or clique standard, for example, is likely to have the 
force of reality for one’s self, while family standards, 
although sincerely assented to, seem to belong more in 
the world of father and mother, and Sunday-school 
standards in the realm of teacher and minister. Thus 
we find, side by side, principles in active use, and prin- 
ciples in cold storage, so to speak. We greatly need 
information as to the actual moral judgments of children, 
and as to whether they are functioning judgments or 
cold-storage judgments. One would like to know, for 
example, whether many ten-year-old boys, brought up 
in middle-class families, are like this picture: 

Of course, mother and dad are all right, and brother and sister. 
You mustn’t say anything against them, especially mother. I'll 
stick by all of them, of course..... Of course mother and dad 


want me to be good, and they think I’m better than I really am. 
But it’s easy for them to be good, and some day, when I’m grown 


80 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


up, I’ll be like them. . . . . What they tell you in Sunday school 
is all right, too, only . . . . well, when I’m as old as my teacher, 
maybe I’ll be like her. .... Of course, I don’t have to be as 
good as ministers. .... As for school, of course what the teacher 
and the books say is so; leastways it was so for Washington, and 
Lincoln, and Thomas Edison. But she doesn’t play marbles, or 
foot-ball, and she doesn’t belong to the gang that meets in our 
barn. I s’pose she and Washington wouldn’t fib or swipe things, 
and they wouldn’t say “gosh,” and they wouldn’t throw stones 
at Curly Jim’s gang, but then, .... well, some day I s’pose 
I wont myself..... But, O boy! wouldn’t I like to be Babe 
Ruth! .... And if I had a million dollars I’d buy two auto- 
mobiles, and an aeroplane, and a dirigible..... Yes, of course 
I ought to get my lessons, but gee! all the boys’ll be at the swim- 
ming hole, and I mustn’t miss it... .. Am I a good little boy ? 
Naw, but I’m a good sport, and I don’t snitch, and... . and 
.... Tl stand by ma and dad. 


When children make this distinction between the 
principles they assent to and the principles they live by, 
are they so very different from us adults? When we 
ourselves speak of moral law, do we mean what we think 
ought to be taken as such law, or rather the working 
standards of our actual conduct? How do we determine 
what is reasonable and practicable in the particular 
circumstances in which we are placed ? 


Yes, I ought to love my competitor as myself, but business is 
business. I have to conform to business customs or shut up shop. 
Some day, perhaps, the way of doing business will be 
changed. ...'. 

Yes, in a really brotherly industrial order profits would not 
come first and the good of the working man’s children last, but you 
see, when I sell the product of my factory I have to meet the 
prices of my competitors. I am doing the best I can under the 
circumstances. .... 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 81 


Of course, in strictness I ought to do a full day’s work for a 
full day’s pay, but there’s unfairness in the wage-and-profits 
system anyhow, and I’m not going to strain myself to increase the 
profits of those who already have more than they know what to 


Of course, the single standard of sex-morality is right, but ac 
long as the sex-desire remains so strong you can’t expect men to 
be too strict. Besides, I’m as good as the general run of 


No, I’m not as good as I ought to be; I have faults, just as 
everybody has. I guess I’m just about a decent, average sort of 
fellow. Anyhow, my standing with my neighbors is O.K. 


Thus do adults, just like children, distinguish between 
the theoretical “ought” and the practical, working 
rules by which self-judgment is actually guided. Moral 
laws are “accepted”? that do not come home to us. 
Which ones do come home? As a rule, those that 
express the actual social situations with which we are 
most familiar, and especially the ones in which our pur- 
poses have free scope. 

4. Yet, with children, as with adults, the disparity 
between the acknowledged standard and the working 
rules of one’s social groups comes now and then to 
clear consciousness in the form of inner conflict. A 
sermon or a religious revival; an emergency of the 
nation; a poem or a story; a crisis in life, such as a great 
loss, a great peril, or romantic love; acquaintance with 
a strong or beautiful character; the hush of a sacrament; 
aesthetic elevation in the presence of natural beauty 
or through great music; the musings of adolescence; 
the direct appeal of a teacher—incidents like these 
now and again warm up cold and disused ideals, pro- 
ducing according to circumstances self-condemnation, 


82 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


punctilious effort to raise conduct above the conven- 
tional level, zeal for reform, or a passion for the “‘right 
as such.”’ Doubtless adolescents are, on the whole, 
more susceptible to this than either children or mature 
persons, but in all probability we underestimate rather 
than overestimate the capacity of childhood for such 
sentiments. 

When they are aroused, how do they relate the indi- 
vidual to society? As a rule they simply bring some 
already professed social ideal out of cold storage. We 
take up the slack, so to say, in respect to fair play, kindli- 
ness, charitable deeds, promptness, honesty, our moods 
and tempers, or going to church and saying our prayers. 
That is, the general social outlines remain the same 
as before, but we improve the quality or amount of the 
filling. For example, a school child who is thus awak- 
ened may apply himself more industriously to his 
studies, though what it is to study and what the mean- 
ing of school is remain unchanged for him. Or, he may 
desist from evading the payment of his fare on the street 
car, yet never question the property right held by the 
company in the form of a perpetual franchise in the 
streets. Honor in business, utter squareness, are with- 
out question admirable ideals, but they do not ordinarily 
affect the prior question of the fairness or humanity of 
the structure of business itself. 

I submit these four points as a fair account of the 
usual process whereby moral law becomes a control of 
the young. Nearly all the facts will be found to fall 
under these heads. Yet not quite all. Children do 
not merely accept law from their social environment; 
they are by no means doomed to the unending rebirths 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 83 


of a self-identical social authority. They can and they 
do participate in experiences in which social authority 
is re-created. In order to see that this is so, and how it 
comes about, we need only consider the relation of 
children to each of the three fundamental concepts of 
ethics, “‘ought—ought not,” ‘“‘right—wrong,” and ‘‘ good 
—hbad.” Though ‘‘good—bad”’ is probably the most 
used ethical term of childhood, the corresponding con- 
cept is used less than the other two. The good and the 
bad are not ordinarily understood by children as referring 
to desirable or undesirable end-results of human situa- 
tions produced by an act or expressed in it. Rather, 
the child thinks of superposed pains and penalties, or 
occasionally rewards, together with the corresponding 
social classification, and approval or disapproval, of the 
agent or of his act. A “‘good”’ child is traditionally one 
who is compliant toward his elders. That is, for the 
most part “good”’ is anything that is approved, and 
“bad” anything that is condemned, by adults. This, 
I say, is the usual state of the child mind. But it is not 
the invariable state, and it may be made by education 
less usual than it is. 

For even children press back to the sources of ethical 
impulse, thinking no longer of a law to which one sub- 
mits, but of some self-evidencing good or self-evidencing 
bad as a possible end-result of conduct. A delightful 
story is told of a child who was restless at night because 
he kept thinking how he would like to put a drop of cold 
water on Dives’ tongue! A pupil in a primary class in a 
Sunday school, after hearing the story of the passage of 
the Israelites through the Red Sea, was invited to look 
at a Tissot picture of it. “Mrs. M.,” said she to the 


84 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


teacher, “‘it doesn’t seem fair that the horses, too, should 
be drowned.” A boy of about six asked: “Were any 
children drowned in the Flood—any very little children 
that didn’t know how to do right?” What has been 
called children’s sense of justice has been noticed by 
everybody who studies children. It is often an echo 
of adult standards—sometimes a cruel echo, as in 
children’s almost universal belief in the justice of savage 
punishments. Yet now and then, direct contemplation 
of a situation, say, of a persecuted dog, or of the amiable 
qualities of a member of the “lower classes,” or of the 
grotesqueness of someone’s moral self-conceit, or of the 
inefficiency of some standard process, produces an original 
moral valuation that outruns our moral conventional- 
ities. 

That adolescence, when it is not already withered by 
the desert heat of our competitive and selfish ways, or 
carried off its feet by the rush of modern life, is richly 
capable of these fresh appreciations, every student of the 
period has recognized. ‘The ability of youth to take a 
fresh look, to sympathize, to dream, to aspire, to doubt, 
to be hotly for and hotly against the whole world, to 
believe that the desirable is practicable—all this con- 
stitutes one of the great moral assets of a progressive 
race. For it is in and through first-hand, unauthorized, 
not conventionally encouraged gazing into good and 
bad that conventional ‘‘ought—ought not,” and ‘‘right— 
wrong,” are judged and revised. The judging and 
revising have to become a group process, of course, but 
the start and the stimulus therefor originate in indi- 
viduals who vary from the herd or from the institu- 
tion, 


HOW THE YOUNG ASSIMILATE MORAL LAW 85 


Children and youth, then, can and do have a part « 


in the renewal and reconstruction of moral law through 
contemplation of self-evidencing good. How large a 
part they might have, nay, how much we adults need 
their help, will not be known until we submit to their 
scrutiny various phases of our conduct that we now 
conceal from them. Writers of novels and of plays have 
not failed to perceive the dramatic possibilities in a 
situation in which an objective-minded young person, 
reared conventionally, for the first time perceives the 
human realities within, say, one’s father’s business. If, 
in our moral education, we should pursue the policy of 
leading children to observe and independently judge 
the actual facts of human weal and woe, who can doubt 
that our moral standards would rise with unprecedented 
rapidity ? 

Here, as so many times before, we come upon the 
parallelism—rather, the identity—of the moral experi- 
ence of child and adult. Morality, as it was before our 
Civil War, required obedience to the fugitive slave law, 
but what was one to do when a human being, fleeing 
from servitude, came to one for help in reaching Canada ? 
In spite of the wrenching of an old conscience, in spite 
of the birth-pang of a new conscience, many a northern 
citizen became a part of the “underground railroad,” 
simply because it was the obvious, self-evidencing good. 
So the prophet of old, seeing the poor sold for a pair of 
shoes, beholding the great, landed proprietors panting 
even for the dust on the head of the poor, and realistically 
noting that the priesthood and the elaborate ceremonial 
worship at Beth-el were a support for the existing 
social system, boldly reinterpreted even God, declaring 


8 


i 


86 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


the Yahweh hated the sacrifices that were offered him; 
he desired only that justice should roll down as waters, 
and righteousness as a mighty stream. 

Unless we think of the moral experience of men 
generally, the moral experience of children included, as 
capable of having a part in such re-creation of moral 
law—or, if one prefer, such fresh discovery of eternal 
moral law—we shall be as men who know the summer, 
autumn, and winter, of the arbutus, but not its spring. 


CHAPTER VII 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 
IN THE SCHOOL 


Having seen how moral law gets control of the 
young, we are ready to ask our second question: 


II 


What is the relation of this process, now occurring in 
the young, to the process of moral transmission and 
moral evolution in society at large? In particular, what 
is the actual relation of the school to society in respect 
to morals? 

The answer has been given, in part, in the preceding 
chapter, where we saw children and adults acting alike. 
Obviously the moral process in the child is a miniature 
of the process in the race—rather, the two are continu- 
ous with each other. Moral evolution is going on in the 
experience of the young, and it might go on much faster. 

Failure to perceive this truth, and to give it due 
weight in the theory of moral education, is the most 
deadly of all faults in current views of the school and its 
functions. For these views recognize only certain 
fractions of the moral experience, and the relation of 
child experience to moral evolution is ignored. 

The fraction of the truth that is everywhere appreci- 
ated is that moral life in the young requires adjustment 
of an individual to an already existing social order. This 
adjustment takes the form, now of obedience to a rule 


87 


88 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


even before it is fully understood, now of co-operation 
with those who are recognized as wiser, now as carrying 
one’s load in the industrial system. Often a second 
fraction is recognized, namely, that moral law demands 
sympathy for distress, and respect for persons as such 
regardless of nationality and social class. What remains 
unrecognized, and of course unacted upon, may now be 
stated, along with comments upon the resulting gaps in 
current moral education. 

1. The extreme readiness of the young to take the 
impress of the social order just as it exists, though this 
readiness contains one essential condition for the growth 
of moral character, makes the young the main vehicle 
for perpetuating the defects as well as the virtues of any 
age. The defective conventions, the prejudices, the 
evasions, practiced by existing society are transmitted 
within the moral experience itself, not merely by some 
extraneous and hostile process. Formulated principles, 
codes, public opinion, and institutions are obviously 
essential to social stability in the sense of the mainte- 
nance of the gains of past moral evolution; nevertheless 
they one and all represent the period of their origin; 
one and all tend to place together, and to make binding, 
moral relations into which the period of their origin 
was growing and those out of which it was moving. 
Thus all our funded morality becomes a bulwark not only 
of the good, but also of the not-good-enough. In other 
words, liability to ethical illusion inheres in morality 
as such, both in the race at large and in the experience 
of children. But no scheme of moral education appears 
to have grappled with the resulting problem. Teachers 
everywhere appear to assume that moral process in the 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 89 


school is enough; no responsibility is taken for moral 
evolution. 

2. A second capital fact of our social inheritance in 
the moral sphere is that one and the same process trans- 
mits both moral standards and excuses for not living up 
to them. Even in the schools—yes, at the precise points 
where the principles of conduct are brought to the fore— 
the disparity between professed principle and conven- 
tional working rules can be found. It must be there as 
long as the schools remain silent concerning the gap 
between adult standards and adult performance. If 
anyone doubts this, let him investigate any school, 
secular or religious, at the points where it touches upon 
morality in the sphere of either economics or industry 
or politics. He will find generalized ideals of thrift, 
honesty, work, fairness, sympathy, generosity, loyalty, 
law, patriotism, and the faithful use of the franchise. 
The pupil may form generalized standards for business, 
industry, and the state, but from the school he will not 
learn, except in the rarest instances, to what degree 
these standards already prevail, or where and how, if 
actually applied, they would be resisted. Further, 
the concrete meaning of various ideals is kept obscure 
because this meaning depends upon social facts that we 
do not like to talk about. We might take thrift as an 
example. What is thrift as zi is conventionally practiced ? 
It is, according to circumstances, the forced, pinching, 
never-ending anxiety of multitudes of workers who can 
hardly feed, clothe, and educate their children, or the 
systematic elimination of waste from the establishments 
of the 2 per cent of our population that owns 60 per cent 
of the property! Does the virtue of thrift mean making 


go LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


one’s self comfortable and contented in such a system, or | 
does it mean squeezing into a favored place in the system 
(one of the 2 per cent if possible), or what? Similarly, 
what is the meaning of the ideal of hard work? Work 
for whom, and towhatend? Does the ideal of hard work 
mean adapting one’s self to the present industrial system ? 
These questions do not imply any fault-finding with 
the teaching of thrift and of hard work, but rather the 
necessity of noting the limitations of such teaching and 
particularly the concomitant learnings that go along 
with it. When we teach thrift and hard work do we 
inadvertently teach also the actually existing and every- 
day working notions of success, of business and indus- 
trial standards, and of the rightness of the system as a 
whole? When we teach love to men, do we teach also 
(inadvertently, of course), evasion of the law of love? 
Similar questions are in order as to our teachings con- 
cerning our form of civil society. A government “of the 
people, by the people, and for the people”’; a society in 
which barriers of birth are abolished, and sheer manhood 
counts; a land in which every child may receive an 
education at public expense; the homeland of freedom 
of thought, of speech, of press, and of assemblage; equal- 
ity of rich and poor before the law; a refuge for the 
oppressed of all lands; a nation that does not covet its 
neighbor’s territories; a humanitarian civilization at 
last—what does all this, which we teach to all the 
children, signify as education? Does it signify that 
pupils are being trained to base their actions as citizens 
upon these ideals, actually holding legislatures, courts, 
and administrative officers of government to these good 
old tests of government; or, does it signify, rather, 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY QI 


emotional response to an imaginary America, without 
frank recognition of the difference between the imaginary 
and the real? If the latter, then this apparently idealis- 
tic moral teaching becomes, as a matter of fact, a mantle 
that covers faults that need to be exposed in order that 
they may be corrected. At the best the result is duality 
of codes—lip-loyalty to the ideals to which our history 
leads us, but subservience to contemporary forces that 
resist the ideal. 

These are not exceptional difficulties, but samples of 
a universal problem for education, whether in state 
schools or in church schools. The very same process 
whereby moral law secures control of the young carries 
with it habituation to moral duality, the acceptance of 
standards but non-expectation of obedience to them. 
In other words, we are developing in the young two incon- 
sistent codes, with all the self-sophistications that this 
involves. As matters now stand, one can be a good man, 
a good citizen, and a good churchman, and yet acquiesce, 
with one’s social group, in institutional habits that contra- 
dict and defeat one’s conscientiously held principles. 

3. But a remedial principle, as we have seen, is 
available, not only in adult experience but in child 
experience as well. It is the direct facing of good and 
evil, and the free exercise of judgment upon them. 
Herein the dynamic of moral evolution as a whole resides. 
We teachers need to make clear to ourselves that we 
may get different and even inconsistent results in our own 
thinking on specific facts of human life according to the 
ethical category through which we make our approach. 
Ii, for example, we contemplate together a west-side 
privileged child and an east-side unprivileged one, we 


7 


g2 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


can easily see that something or other that depends upon 
the purposes of men is not good enough, yet we may not 
discover in relation to the facts an instance of neglect 
of duty or of doing what is not right. Obviously we 
must revise our notions of right and duty in a case like 
this. Itis through the progressively self-evidencing good 
that we increasingly discover what is the duty of man. 

What sort of men, women, and children are we pro- 
ducing by our interactions with one another and by our 
failures to interact? ‘This is the basic moral test. A 
factory or a mine produces something besides com- 
modities; it modifies human life directly. A newspaper 
does not merely purvey news and opinion, it is not just a 
container by means of which something is conveyed to 
us; it is a mode of contact of men with men wherein 
levels of human life are being determined. Civil 
government is not just a mechanism that can be under- 
stood by reading the constitution; it is a complex of 
living, pulsating human forces that are making men what 
they are. But our conventional standards of right and 
duty do not test any one of these three by any direct 
inspection of the human welfare or ill-fare to which they 
contribute. And these three are typical. 

Often and often we dodge this sort of test—this invita- 
tion to promote moral evolution—by doing humane acts 
in alleviation of the consequences of our system (which 
means the consequences of doing right and our duty 
according to the conventional understanding of them), 
and then patting ourselves on the back because we are 
so responsive to human need! Undoubtedly the most 
difficult job that any moral leader of adults has to under- 
take is to induce them to gaze steadily at the conse- 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 93 


quences of their conduct. “Mother, what is meat?” 
asked a very small child at dinner one day. This 
question, the mother says, banished meat from the 
family table for months. The point of this story is not 
that meat should be banished, but that our comforts 
are produced at costs from which we habitually turn away 
our eyes. ‘‘Put myself in his place? Nay, why should 
I? He is doubtless in a place that is adapted to him, 
though it would not be to me.” ‘He and I alike are 
parts of a system that I did not invent; if I had not been 
wise in my day the system would have put me where he 
is now.” “God made us different, unequal; that’s 
why.” Anything rather than a matter-of-fact facing 
of human conditions just as they are, and asking whether 
‘this is just what we want. 

Because children, as was hinted a little way back, 
have fewer of these acquired inhibitions, education is 
the precise sphere in which we can most certainly and 
economically strike at our moral dualism and evasions. 
Let us, then, go on to ask: 


Tit 


What does this discussion indicate as to the method 
of moral education ? 

It is commonly assumed that the greatest difficulty 
besetting the child in his moral growth is his tendency, 
because of his native impulses, to vary from his fellows. 
But in fact what most retards moral strength is the 
child’s penchant for conforming to the ways of his 
fellows, particularly the ways of adults! Not until 
this truth is seen and acted upon shall we make much 
progress in methods of moral education. 


* 


94 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


At present—to speak broadly—three sorts of method 
are in use which, for the sake of brevity, we may call 
the mystical, the ritualistic, and the pragmatic. The 
first leads the pupil, through contemplation of noble 
characters or of noble virtues, to identify himself with 
ideals. The second, through salutes to the flag, songs, 
reiteration of loyal sentiments, selections from history, 
and participation in celebrations, induces the pupil 
to identify himself with an existing institution. The 
third helps pupils to solve the immediate problems of 
living together in pupil groups, whether in class or school- 
room, on the playground, or on Scout ‘“‘hikes.” Now, 
though each of these probably contributes something 
good, leaves some permanent deposit, and should be 
retained in our programs, nowhere within them do we 
find an induction into the greater moral issues of the 
time; nowhere in them do we find conditions that promise 
much transfer of school morality to the larger society; 
nowhere in them is there any hint of the defects, and 
therefore the moral pitfalls, in the things to which pupils 
are led to commit themselves in admiration and loyalty. 
On the other hand, we find here a positive tendency, 
especially in the ritualistic method, to produce moral 
illusion, and to create loyalties that are bound to resist 
moral progress. There is nothing here that can reason- 
ably be expected to prevent the pupils from being sucked 
into the vortex of our customary faults. 

Loyalty, affectionate loyalty, to some existing so- 
cial group or institution is, in very deed, the beginning 
of moral wisdom. Hence the peculiar place of the 
family in any general scheme of moral education. The 
experience of fellowship, of “belonging,” whether in 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 95 


church, school, community, nation, world-society, God’s 
Kingdom, or even a boys’ gang or a girls’ set, is by all 
means to be cherished. Loyalty, however, may mean 
any one of several different things. Granted that within 
it is always a moral germ, as the fidelity to one another 
of the members of an outlaw band; the very fact that 
this moral germ can survive within social imperfections 
of every grade makes necessary a critical attitude toward 
every loyalty whatsoever. When teachers lack this 
critical attitude, when they induce pupils to plump their 
attachments, especially when institutional attachments 
take the form of pleasurable but unthinking crowd 
excitement, then moral education is always in danger of 
becoming immoral by sanctifying our social faults. 
“‘Yes,” I think I hear someone saying, “‘we must at 
some stage of moral education take up the great ques- 
tions of social reconstruction. When pupils have reached 
postgraduate university rank, or possibly in their senior 
undergraduate year, they may well approach, with 
great caution, these difficult problems.” Some bold 
spirits would put the age as low as the high school; 
scarcely anybody would begin the process in the ele- 
mentary grades. But behold the folly of this post- 
ponement. Comparatively few of our citizens ever 
reach even the high school as yet. Moreover, for reasons 
that need to be studied, the actual working morals of 
our institutional life are scarcely ever brought to the 
attention of the vast majority of college and university 
students. Even if every college and university in the 
country were a-quiver with the spirit of moral progress, 
what could they do to bring about actual reconstruction ? 
They would be shut up, as so many academic reformers 


96 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


are now, to palliatives for our pains; they would not 
reach the causes of our diseases. Unless, perchance, 
they noticed that our present methods of moral educa- 
tion, through undiscriminating loyalties, transmit the 
rooted evils as well as the rooted excellences of our 
social order! | 

The experience of active discrimination should begin 
just where the experience of loyalty begins; it should be 
a part of this experience and should grow with it. No 
one is loyal enough—not even a child is loyal enough— 
who does not note the grounds for loyalty, the excel- 
lences that call for admiration, the good that is worthy 
of preservation even at cost to one’s self. But no one 
can effectively note this who does not at the same time 
and in the same act pick it out from among items that 
contrast with it. When this discrimination is lacking, 
the loyalties that are developed in the elementary 
grades are essentially partisanships or crowd enjoyments. 
And the result tends to be a well-meaning citizenry whose 
very loyalty makes them the tools of leaders who have 
an interest in maintaining the present imperfections of 
our institutions. 

The most affectionate loyalty is ever that which 
recognizes the defects in the object of its devotion. 
Blind loyalty is never quite loyal enough, because it 
cannot help its object to overcome its defects. Absolute 
obedience, if there could be such a thing, would ignore 
personal qualities on both sides, and would therefore 
be a-moral. In the first line of method in moral edu- 
cation, therefore, we must have provision for encourag- 
ing the moral discrimination that leads on to moral 
creativity. 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY — 97 


The lack of this factor, and of growth in this direction, 
accounts, I think, for the deadly conventionality of the 
colleges—the professors and the students have already 
graduated from the sort of moral education that was 
provided in their schooling! There is nothing in it 
that carries one forward. Nothing in the moral sphere 
is being created in the colleges; if there were, there 
would be more excitement. When a hen lays an egg 
she cackles. When moral reconstruction is attempted, 
Opposition appears, a struggle ensues, sacrifice becomes 
necessary, and now and then a martyrdom occurs. 
When the great gods appear the lesser gods scream in 
fright. Youth, surely, is a period in which we should 
see and hear such things happening. Woe to the land 
whose young men and young women display none of the 
pangs of moral creativity! 

Postpone the full project method in moral education 
to the college or the high school? Leave imitation, 
emotional manipulation, and camouflaged external 
authority in control in the grade school? No! Forsuch 
a policy robs society of prime resources for its own self- 
renewing. Unwittingly it perpetuates our moral illu- 
sions and evasions. Even in the primary grades the full 
project principle is required—if for no other reason, as 
an offset to out-of-school conventionalizing processes. 
And the full project principle cannot be employed in any 
hedged-off experience, whether the narrow experience of 
schoolroom or in a Scout troop. Wherever the moral 
experience of the child occurs, wherever ethical assump- 


t When students get sufficiently excited over a social issue to throw 
eggs at one who is discussing it, there is ground for hope. In the scale 
of intelligence, such egg-throwing is one degree higher than indifference. 


98 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


tions are being formed, there is the field in which moral 
issues or problems are to be found, there certain of the 
essential data are to be sought, there good and bad are to 
be directly faced and judged, there moral conventionality 
ig to be resisted and supplanted by moral thinking. 
«here is, perhaps, no better place for initiating such a 
process than in a group within which several children 
find it necessary to live together, but the process will 
not reach its goal until it stretches out into the larger 
society of which the child is likewise a member. 

When the Washington Conference on the Limitation 
of Armaments was in session, a first-grade class, because 
of practically inevitable contacts, became aware of what 
was going on, and of the fact that older persons were 
sending petitions to officers of our government. Of 
their own initiative, the children got up a petition of 
their very own, and printed it in crayon, each one 
signing his name. It read: ‘Please stop fighting.” 
The whole thing was so serious, so real, it grasped the 
actual situation so firmly, that the teacher and principal 
did not feel at liberty to withhold this document from 
the Secretary of State. Let us not treat such incidents 
as pretty pictures of childhood over which to gush; 
the question is, Do children, in cases like these, perceive 
moral realities, and has their attitude any proper part 
in determining events? ‘The more one studies incidents 
like this, the more significance one finds in the idea that 
childhood rather than adulthood is the typical figure in 
the kingdom of the good. At last, it dawns upon one 
that many of the great issues of society—war, for example 
—can be grasped, in essence, by the very young. The 
great wrongs in the world are those that deprive men of 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 99 


the simple, basic necessities that even children can feel 
the importance of, such as food, health, and liberty. 
And the steps that we must take in order to correct these 
wrongs are just such steps as children have to take 
almost daily in their struggle to live with one another. 

Do you fear to open to children these major issues 
in society lest our adult defects should produce disrespect 
for mankind? If so, you have less faith than I in the 
soundness of human nature. Intimate acquaintance 
with the primary experiences of men, the experiences out 
of which arise the great social issues, broadens and 
deepens one’s sympathy with all classes of men, wrong- 
doers included. 

A few hints may now be given as to types of policy 
and procedure for developing children’s capacity for 
moral creativity: : 


1. Self-government projects—Make them real in the sense 
explained in the last chapter, and then help the pupils to develop 
regular and stated methods for always knowing and appreciating 
the motives, feelings, points of view of all parties, offenders 
included. Good order is never a sufficient end; understanding, 
-and fellowship based upon it—fellowship between majority and 
minority, and fellowship between offended and offender—must. 
always be aimed at, and methods for attaining it must be devel- 
oped. 

2. Philanthropic projects—Let them include a study, not only 
of how to relieve distress or bring happiness, but also of the causes 
of distress, and what men are doing or not doing to remove these 
causes. Let the pupils get the point of view of relief agencies, and 
likewise of the persons relieved. 

3. Civic projects—Acquaintance with civic institutions and 
processes should not stop with knowledge of, and admiration for, 
our social machinery, however wonderful or worthy of praise it 
may be. Social causation should be revealed as at work—for 
example, hew men become criminals; who corrupt police depart- 


100 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


ments, and why; how civic reforms have been accomplished; 
who really pays the taxes, and so on. Attention should always 
be given to dissatisfied elements in the population, and always, 
along with loyal admiration, there should develop a realization of 
the unsolved problems that fall to the oncoming citizen. 

4. Current-events projects.—One of the most unfair things that 
a teacher can do is to use current events, warm with feeling, to 
close the mind of the pupil to issues instead of opening it. ‘These 
issues offer a peculiarly fine opportunity to deepen pupils’ moral 
appreciations by living imaginatively in the experience of con- 
tending groups and parties. What is back of the incident? 
What final interest dictates the policy of this or that individual 
or group? What human need ought to have a hearing? These 
questions are far more important than the usual one, Who is 
right ? 

5. History projects, and biographical studies ——Not to furnish 
examples for imitation, not to sweep the pupil into an unthinking 
emotion of patriotism, but to deepen his insight into the facts and 
issues of life—this is the main purpose of biography and of history. 
This means neither hero-worship noriconoclasm. It means neither 
untrue idealization of the past, nor gloating over its defects. It 
means never feeding a prejudice, but also never failing to see the 
nobility in men, both friends and enemies. Hence, method should 
be directed to: (a) Definition of issues in both individual and group 
conduct. What had to be decided? (b) Understanding of 
motives, or seeing through the eyes of other men. (c) Seeing 
how causes actually work in human life, especially in social insti- 
tutions. (d) Discovering the unsolved problems of society. How 
different this is from the so-called teaching of history that cul- 
minates in a conviction that the really great problems are already 
solved, and that what we now have to do is to keep in motion the 
machinery that we have inherited! 

6. Projects related to business and industry.—The main focus 
of the interest should never be profits, or mere processes, or 
efficiency defined in terms of extra-human products, but the human 
beings concerned, and what happens tothem. If we make persons 
central we shall certainly find the importance of everything that 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY IOI 


touches their well-being, but if we focus upon the means of well- 
being, we may never reach the human problem at all. What 
men, women, and children are affected by this industry, or this 
branch of commerce? What joys and sorrows come to them 
through it? What do they think about it? Does anything need 
to be improved, and if so how are we related to this improvement ? 
The result will be a residuum, not only of intelligence as to how to 
carry on business and industry, but also of live human problems, 
together with data upon them, and the urge of fellow-feeling with 
all parties concerned. 

4. Projects related to modes of living.—lI here repeat a suggestion 
in an earlier chapter, that projects should be directed in all frank- 
ness toward understanding and evaluating types of home life, 
current amusements, sports, current reading-matter, the cultural 
institutions in the community, sorts of success and failure, the 
school itself. The great failures of our individual and social life 
should have a place here alongside of the great successes, and both 
should be traced to their roots. The disguises whereby we adults 
endeavor to make tolerable what should not be tolerated should 
be torn aside. The realities within class distinctions should be 
made to stand out. But nowhere in these projects should there be 
any propaganda, that is, attempt to transfer conclusions without 
thinking, but rather material and stimulus for doing one’s own 
thinking. 

8. Projects in world-friendship.—Perhaps this phrase will 
explain itself, but lest it should not do so, I will point out the 
possibility of deliberately extending our acquaintance with our 
fellows with a view to contributing to the formation of a genuine 
world-brotherhood. Playing games with population elements 
that are usually separated from us geographically or socially; 
getting acquainted, by visitation or by correspondence, in such a 
way that mutual helpfulness is developed; even living imagina- 
tively as neighbors with people on the other side of the world— 
this is still another mode of learning what life is, what its problems 
are, and to some extent how they can be solved. Projects of this 
type can be linked with study projects concerning the actual inter- 
national situation, the relation of commerce and foreign invest- 


~ 


102 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


ments thereto, and the inefficiencies of current statesmanship. 
Is it not clear that one essential step toward a warless world is 
to subject the pseudo-wisdom of the wise to the real wisdom of 
the simple-hearted ? 


Some possible doubts about such a project method in 
moral education must now be considered. 


1. Will projects like these unduly burden the sympathies of 
children? Not unless teachers make the mistake of “working 
upon the feelings” of pupils, or introduce them without reason to 
gruesome sights. The policy should be steadily pursued of 
utilizing evil merely as a necessary background upon which to 
display the good in sharp outline. 

2. Will such projects make cynics of the young? Not unless 
someone leads them in cynicism. If the teacher really believes 
in the past enough to see in it a prophecy of a better future, prob- 
lems of reconstruction of life should cause the classroom to be 
pervaded by eager hope. 

3. Will these projects make sentimentalists of the young 
because of the gap between aspiration for a better world and 
ability to do anything effective to bring it to pass? If two condi- 
tions are met, this will not occur. The two conditions are that 
scientific method be used in the discovery and demonstration of 
causes and effects, and that appropriate action, within the capacity 
of the pupils, be constantly taken with respect to conditions in 
school, home, community, church, state, nation, and foreign lands 
that the pupils are already able to influence. See chapter v. 

4. Finally, will this policy make radicals of the young? 
If by being radical we mean readiness to make changes without 
stopping to think, no; for this is a method of producing deeper 
thinking, and more widely distributed thinking, than we have ever 
had. The method tends to produce reflective obedience at the 
precise point where thoughtless discontent might “break the 
china.” . . . . If by being radical we mean insisting upon applying 
some social dogma without due regard for the consequences to 
others, again no; for the method is the direct opposite of the dog- 
Ol Vl BE ls If by being radical we mean stiff adherence to a 


MORAL LAW AND MORAL CREATIVITY 103 


class interest, still again, no; for this method—and as far as we 
know, this method alone—will develop sympathetic understanding 
of the experience of all classes... . . If by radical we mean hold- 
ing one’s self above moral law and the helpful authority of the 
past, decidedly no; for this is the only known method whereby 
what is worthy of respect can be disengaged from that to which 
respect is no longer due. The greatest obstacle to respect for 
authority is the company it keeps. .... But if by being radical 
we mean readiness to form ideals, and heartily to believe in apply- 
ing ideals in practice; if we mean facing unflinchingly the actual 
human situation anywhere, and readiness to make changes in our 
individual and social life as fundamental as the needs that are 
perceived—changes in the interest, not of a class, but of men just 
as men—then, yes, this method will make radicals. And “this is 
the intention, sir!” 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 


The thought-directed energies of civilized man—his 
projects—are predominantly devoted to economic prob- 
lems and activities. The adult male, with relatively 
few exceptions, daily expends his freshest hours upon 
making a living or accumulating property; the adult 
female, if she is not an employee of others, occupies 
herself with the immediate economies of the home. The 
uncertainties and the anxieties that arrest attention and 
make men think are concerned, most of all, with these 
occupations and the products thereof. Even in our 
“higher” or “more spiritual” enterprises—domestic, 
religious, humanitarian, artistic, scientific—the eco- 
nomic factor is practically omnipresent, and not seldom 
it is prominent. 

Therefore, the present tendency to bring the schools 
into closer relations with our economic activities is 
fundamentally (though not necessarily in all its present 
details) in the interest of realism and life-likeness in the 
educative experience. School-experience is obviously 
the natural place for the initiation of the young into all 
the basic factors of the social life, the economic included. 
Accordingly, the discussion that is now to follow pre- ° 
supposes that the schools will depart farther and farther 
from the standards of leisure-class education, and will 
ultimately become saturated with economic conscious- 
ness. Against this saturation I not only do not protest; 


104 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 105 


I regard it, rather, as a necessary phase of the mastery 
of life-processes by thinking. But much—almost every- 
thing—depends, first, upon getting into the school 
consciousness the reality of the economic order, not 
illusions concerning it, and second, upon establishing 
and maintaining genuine continuity between school 
projects and the projects of industry and of business. 
It behooves us, then, to inquire: 

I. How, as a matter of fact, children do now come 
under the control of economic forces and acquire eco- 
nomic consciousness. 

II. Whether the conceptions thus acquired are true 
to fact, and whether the accompanying attitudes are 
morally justifiable. 

III. Whether or not business and industry, as they 
are now constituted, carry forward the project experi- 
ence as it is understood by educators, or check and 
thwart it. Is there fundamental harmony, or funda- 
mental inconsistency, between project method and real 
life P 

I 


How, then, does the economic order become incor- 
porated into our thinking and our purposing? To what 
extent do children get their introduction to it through 
systematic, well-considered school procedures, and to 
what extent through hit-and-miss extrascholastic experi- 
ences? To ask this question is to answer it. The 
young obtain their notions concerning economic laws 
and processes, and they form their economic attitudes, 
almost entirely through out-of-school contacts with 
business and industry, together with the social rami- 


~~ 


106 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


fications thereof. Such facts as the following come 
very early into the circle of children’s experiences: 


The dependence of satisfactions upon money.—I have asked 
several large groups of adults at what age children first come to 
realize this. The usual answer is, at five years or less. Probably 
most children begin to spend money before the age of six, and 
have a distinct liking for the possession of it. 

The sources of the family income.—The father works at a trade, 
or practices a profession, or keeps a store, or what not, and the 
children are aware of the fact and of its relation to income. 

The distinction between employing and being employed.— 
Though there be no family servants, the distinction is soon known 
and felt. Some member of one’s own family is employed; the 
delivery boy is hired by the grocer; the conductor and the motor- 
man on the trolley car work for somebody else. Then comes the 
labor strike, with the imitative taking of sides. 

The fact of poverty.—‘The poor ye have always with you,” 
and they are always mentioned in one way or another. Scarcely 
anything else is a more obvious, stated, and expected fact of our 
economic order. 

Social distinctions based upon income or upon possessions.— 
Differences in apparel or in playthings; differences in the size and 
surroundings of dwellings; between “shanks’ horses” and milady’s 
limousine; between the laborer’s table and the glitter of fashionable 
hotels; the aloofness of certain children from others—these and 
many other common facts make a groove in the child’s mind 
between social classes. 

The economic conception of success, and the prestige of wealth._— 
Ideas of this sort are often instilled through fairy stories; they 
arrive early, anyhow, through the talk that the child hears. Such 
a one is worth millions, or he is making loads of money—spoken 
with admiration often approaching awe. Every child knows, even 
in tender years, that wealth means influence, being looked up to, 
social greatness. 


Thus, before a child enters the school his notions of 
life are likely to have come under partial, but usually 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 107 


effective, control of the existing economic order. After 
he enters school, the same influences surround him in his 
out-of-school time; he participates more and more in 
buying, selling, earning, and employing; he hears, sees, 
reads about business or industrial events such as suc- 
cesses and failures, competition, speculation, labor dis- 
putes. Meantime, within the school his main occupations 
are studies and plays that have only incidental relation 
thereto. -This incidental relation may sometimes have 
significance, but the main fact is that, while the school 
does only a little to form his economic ideas and atti- 
tudes, the economic system itself continually seeps into 
his thinking and his character. 

What, then, are the notions and the attitudes formed 
thus through the pressure of environment? Obviously 
the very ideas and attitudes that prevail in the eco- 
nomic life itself, and in the ramifications of economic 
standards throughout society. The system assimilates 
the young to itself by what is called informal as against 
formal education. Continuously, pervasively, every- 
where, with every child, the process goes on. Differ- 
ences of emphasis and of point of view occur, according 
to the economic class with which a given child is associ- 
ated, so that children of privilege and children of poverty 
see things somewhat differently. Yet, as a rule, the two 
_ see only complementary sides of one and the same thing, 
so that the opposite attitudes that develop are likewise 
complementary and truly representative of inner strains 
of the economic order itself. It is safe to assume that 
within the preadolescent (or at most, early adolescent) 
growth of nearly all children assumptions and attitudes 
like the following are formed: 


~ 


108 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


That a good bargain or successful deal is one in which you get 
the most for yourself, with no necessary thought of what the other 
fellow gets. 

That one’s purpose in business or industry will be to get pos- 
session of property and control of men. Persons who have a 
thought beyond immediate maintenance—and in nearly all families 
there is such thought—aspire to possess enough to make themselves 
secure against the contingencies of life, and to get into, or remain 
within, the class of employers. That business and industry should 
exist for the sake of producing goods to supply the needs of men, 
and that the true test is service to one’s fellows—no such idea is 
within the horizon of children simply because it is scarcely within 
the horizon of business and industry themselves. 

That the standard of success is not merely what one gets by 
earning it, but also and more what one gets as profits. One aspires, 
therefore, to be lucky, shrewdly venturesome, a sharp bargainer, 
cunning, rather than creative and productive. 

That there is nothing disgraceful in carrying this grasping 
process as far as the law allows, though ideally one would some- 
what further limit such conduct as deception, taking advantage of 
another’s ignorance, or capitalizing another’s helplessness (help- 
lessness arising, say, from hunger or from having a family to sup- 
port). The Great War gave a startling demonstration of the 
morals of business when many a man of means gladly gave a 
son to the country, and then turned around and took enormous 
profits from the same country simply because it was in trouble 
and he could take unusual advantage of it. 

That this getting for one’s self is a competitive process, which 
is a more or less refined grabbing or seizure, or using one’s wits 
to get more than others, so that where one man gains other men 
lose or at least miss the mark. This notion is considerably modi- 
fied in labor circles by an assumption, growing out of labor-union 
history, that laborers will restrict competition with one another. 

That this competitive struggle naturally and justly leads one 
to ally one’s self with the class that best serves one’s self-interest, 
hence, capitalist with capitalist, employer with employer, laborer 
with laborer. This assumption, too, is modified in certain labor 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 109 


circles by aspiration to make all men workers and therefore 
members of one only class. 

That a successful career means, for a boy, to get into some 
sort of privileged position, to get ahead of one’s fellows (“getting 
on in the world”’ it is sometimes called), and for a girl, being able 
to spend at will. 

That the harshness and self-seeking that all this involves will 
be moderated by gifts to charity or to one’s church, and by at 
least some generosity or high-mindedness, especially between 
economic equals, or in one’s club, but that these will be only 
fringes upon the garment. 


Though children’s thinking may not sharply define 
these concepts and attitudes, nevertheless the concrete 
meanings of them, the forces and man-ways indexed 
by them, are no* only familiar to children, but also 
accepted as the reality, the to-be-expected-as-a-matter- 
of-course in human conduct, their own included. 

The Sunday schools and the public schools endeavor 
to present contrary ideals of personal conduct—loving 
one’s neighbor as one’s self, for example. But these 
are rarely taken as principles for business and industry. 
What we are in this sphere speaks so loudly that children 
cannot hear what we say. As a matter of fact, how 
deeply do we ourselves mean what we say? Surely, to 
assume the legitimacy of the principles upon which we 
do business, and then to advise children to love one 
another as equals, is to cherish a basic inconsistency. 
No mental or moral wriggling will enable us or the 
children to serve both God and mammon. We really 
serve the master of our daily labor, whoever this master 
is. And children, realistic and unsophisticated, take 
our conduct rather than our professions, our unuttered 
assumptions rather than the words that we judge fit 


I10 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


for young ears, as the clue to the real forces of the human 
world. 

These economic forces and laws, operative under the 
eyes of everyone, yet not fully avowed, and never put 
into textbooks, constitute one of the most stupendous of 
all educative forces. Silently, unnoticed by the child 
or by his elders, the young mind bends into conformity 
to the system. It is taken for granted because it is 
omnipresent and practically unchallenged. Moreover, 
it seems to be a thing of nature, for indeed it appeals 
to native traits, such as getting, accumulating, holding, 
emulating, mastering, admiration for power, and fond- 
ness for being admired. It makes, likewise, another 
profound appeal—to our fears. To be sure to have 
enough, and to provide against contingencies for one’s 
self and for one’s children—such contingencies as un- 
employment, sickness, old age, low prices or high prices— 
all this seems as natural as seizing food when one is hungry. 

Thus, in short, the system as it is impresses itself 
upon the young as both natural and right, as natural 
law and moral law combined. Later, when they become 
immersed in economic processes, the assumptions thus 
passively accepted in childhood become foundation 
stones for the “‘rationalizations” that are so character- 
istic of the adult economic intelligence, and we then 
hear of immutable economic principles, and of the 
sacredness of this golden calf that our own hands have 
fashioned. 

II 

Of course this hit-and-miss education sadly mixes 
error with truth, evil with good. The process, described 
in chapter vi, whereby the young take the customary 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW III 


as the right and proper, is in full force in the economic 
sphere as well as in the sphere that we conventionally 
recognize as ethical. Indeed, the two spheres overlap, 
or rather, the ethical includes the economic. For, if 
it is true, as I have asserted, that the thought-directed 
energies of civilized man are predominantly directed to 
economic problems and activities, and if, as is obvious, 
economic action involves relations between men, even 
highly organized relations, then the economic order is 
not only a region of moral experience and of moral law, 
it is the chief region thereof. 

We teachers have been lacking in moral realism. We 
have said, or assumed, that the character of children is 
formed chiefly by family relationships, play, and school 
experience (whether in the public school or in the school 
of the church), whereas character is formed chiefly by 
contacts with ‘‘the work of the world.”” Wherever men’s 
energies chiefly go, particularly their thought-directed 
energies, there are the issues that men feel most con- 
stantly, and thither the feeling of the young goes. If, 
then, it is the duty of the school to introduce the young 
to business and industry just as they are—and I hold 
that this is a duty of the school—we teachers must put 
them upon a higher plane than has been customary, 
and to this end we must sift out fact from error, the 
morally forward-looking from the morally backward- 
looking. We must give up both our misleading silences 
and our misleading idealizations. We must introduce 
the young to business and industry just as they are. 
Not just as they think they are, for the economic struggle 
is characterized by overreadiness for action (with the 
accompanying tendencies to self-deception described 


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II2 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


in chapter iii), whereas the school must represent reflec- 
tion and questioning. Not just as they would like to be 
thought, for the school must penetrate beyond conven- 
tionalities to realities. Finally, not just as they are 
viewed by those who, having been wronged and em- 
bittered by the system, see only badness in the men who 
profit by it. 

Well, then, granted that pupils should be made 
acquainted most literally with gainful occupations and 
processes, what errors of fact, and what dangers of moral 
foreshortening need to be guarded against? The 
answer to this question will furnish partial guidance to 
any teacher who has occasion to introduce projects that 
are related to making a living, thrift, supporting depend- 
ents, understanding the processes of production and 
distribution, the study of vocations, and grasping current 
events and issues in the world of business and industry. 
The following list is only a classification of suggestive 
material; it makes no pretense of gradation or sequence; 
yet in it will be found problems applicable to all grades. 

A. The school should expose the falsity of the cynical self- 
justification, ‘Everybody looks out for number one.” In the sense 
in which this is intended, it is not true. The motive of gain is 
not nearly the universal control of conduct, even in economic 
relations. As father and mother labor for their children, and as 
men and women support their aged parents, so the researcher, 
the artist, the poet, the religious prophet are moved by a more 
creative urge than mere self-interest. So, too, the welfare of others 
is consciously carried upon the conscience of teacher, physician, 
pharmacist, motorman, electrician, locomotive engineer, ship’s 
pilot, telephone operator—indeed, where shall the list stop? 
Where will children want the list to stop? 

B. The school should bring into clear relief the socially construc- 
tive measures already in operation, especially experiments in the 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 113 


humanitarian and democratic reconstruction of human relations. 
I say “bring into clear relief,” meaning thereby, not that they 
should be promoted through the schools, but used as necessary 
data for understanding business and industry as they are, and for 
making clear the sort of problems that the new generation must 
face. The sharing of profits; the sharing of management; boards 
of arbitration in industries; co-operative societies; labor legislation; 
education of the workers; legal restraint of monopoly; the con- 
servation of natural resources—here is a partial list of contempo- 
rary items to which the coming years will surely add. Closely 
related to these are various approaches to economic and labor 
problems by individuals and organizations. Every school child 
should know about the work of the Child Labor Association, for 
example, and likewise everyone should learn about the industrial 
and economic principles avowed by Jewish, Catholic, and Protes- 
tant bodies. These need not be used after the manner of propa- 
ganda at all, but as data upon the existing situation and the prob- 
lems that it necessitates. An incidental effect will be a further 
revelation of widespread idealism in a sphere that is often repre- 
sented as merely sordid or at least selfish. 

C. The school should reveal the darker as well as the brighter 
side of our economic life. ‘The point is not that the school should 
mete out blame to any individual or class, but that it should be 
unflinchingly realistic as to the life that the children are moving 
toward. Why do we shrink from such realism? Is it because our 
deeds are evil, and we wish to conceal them? Or is it simply that 
we are ashamed and helpless? In either case, we need the help 
of the children, help that can come only from those who grow up 
in the habit of seeing facts as they are rather than through the 
eyes of partisanship, and in the habit of thinking, and of thinking 
together, upon the major concerns of society. Let me make as 
explicit as possible that the whole theory of method for which this 
essay stands forbids making the schools an agent of any sort of 
partisanship; but the theory insists that facts as they are, without 
partisan selection, be made accessible, and that the young become 
practiced in thought-analysis with respect thereto. 

D. The school should expose the falsity of the doctrine that our 
competitive economic order, with the domestic broils and the foreign 


= 


II4 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


wars that it breeds, 1s an unavoidable expression of unchanging human 
nature. It is natural, of course, perfectly natural under some 
conditions, to seize, hold on, and fight for possession or mastery. 
But it is natural also, perfectly natural, to enjoy seeing others eat 
and enjoy themselves, to enjoy the good opinion of others, and to 
co-operate with them. Which of these opposite possibilities of 
human nature shall prevail is a matter of training, which may be, 
in turn, a matter of deliberate choice. It is no more true that our 
innate selfishness makes this economic order than that this 
economic order, through the training process already described, 
makes us selfish. As far as human nature is concerned, there is 
nothing to forbid the hope of reconstructing our economic life so 
as to make it a co-operative brotherhood. 

E. The school should expose the irrationality of pure: profits. 
By pure profits I mean the surplus that is taken by capital after 
paying all the costs of production, in which I include not only 
raw material, wages of labor, and interest upon capital, but also 
wages of management, and insurance of risks to capital. This 
surplus, this ‘velvet,’ which is the goal of so much striving, 
cannot allege any justification for itself whatever. It is property 
taken simply because, by virtue of some privileged position, one 
can take it and prevent others from doing so. The hope for this 
surplus, this profit-motive, continually subordinates production 
and humanity, causes wastage and wreckage, and then disguises 
its true character by fallacious talk about human nature. 

F. The school should show why a system that makes profits its 
standard of efficiency and success necessarily works against the public 
interest. It exploits natural resources for the benefit of this 
generation (rather, a small fraction of it). It wastes precious 
resources upon costly competition, as in socially useless advertising 
and competitive selling, and makes the public foot the bill. 
Because it is competitive, it tends, in the nature of the case, to 
treat labor as a commodity, to be purchased at the lowest possible 
price. Indeed, the profit-engine makes not only the laborers, but 
even the managers and owners, little more than cogs and wheels, 
because nowhere is the final test any human good for anybody. 
It seeks to increase its privileges by influencing legislation and 
the administration of law, so that much of our law, as a matter 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW . DES 


of fact, is not directed toward the general welfare at all, but 
toward the further aggregation of power on the part of those who 
already have too much. It seeks foreign markets, and then 
foreign investments for surplus capital, secures control of govern- 
ments for the protection and advancement of its foreign interests, 
gets into conflict with foreign business, demands strong armies 
and navies for “national defense,” and leads nations into war. 
G. The school should help dispel current confusions with respect 
to the nature and ethics of property. Confusion in thinking invites 
partisanship and conflict, and the misuse of potential good. Now, 
it is fair to say that the public mind as a whole is confused as to 
the nature of property as determined by its history, and as to the 
ethics of the situations that continually confront us. In particular, 
fog, dense fog, surrounds the common phrase, ‘‘the sacredness of 
private property.” The phrase seems not inherently inappropri- 
ate, for surely there is a sense in which food is sacred, likewise the 
family roof, the tool with which one creates either commodities 
or beauty, the earth whence all our sustenance is derived. Not 
until something of sacredness attaches to these things shall we 
rescue them from bad uses. But are all types of private property 
through all history sacred, or only some? Property is a changing 
right, being redefined or modified from time to time, our own time 
included. Again, to whom is private property sacred, and wherein 
lies the meaning of this sacredness? Is it sacred to God? If so, 
what is his will with regard to the distribution and the use of it ? 
Is it sacred to some human ideal? If so, what ideal, and how 
can possessions be made to promote this ideal? Or, is it sacred 
to the arbitrary desires of its possessor? How would such sacred- 
ness differ from pure profanity? Or do we mean that sacredness 
attaches to all or some American laws or traditions as to property 
rights? Is there not room for just a suspicion that some particular 
law or privilege is seeking to perpetuate its merely temporary self 
by falsely identifying itself with an eternal principle whereby 
all forms of property are to be judged? ‘The least that the school 
can do is to point out these three simple, non-partisan principles: 
(a) The sacredness of life itself attaches to the things that make 
life and growth and happiness possible. (b) The right of property 
has a long evolution; it has passed through different forms and 


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116 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


stages; it is still evolving, and is susceptible of improvement. 
(c) The sacredness of property at any stage of its evolution can 
be made credible only by showing that it really ministers to the 
good life on the largest possible scale. 

H. Whenever the community is divided the school should help 
its pupils to understand all parties. This means both majorities 
and minorities. We are developing in this country antagonisms 
that are dangerous and destructive. We theoretically deny that 
there is any sound basis for class divisions, yet we are producing 
class divisions and intensifying them at a fearful rate. One of the 
ways in which we do it is this: We give to the young conclusions 
instead of data concerning classes, parties, and movements. We 
do this in the homes, in conversation, in the public prints, and 
even in the schools. The result is that we do not even want to 
get acquainted with certain of our fellow-citizens, and we do not 
really understand them. We thus close the one possible road to 
social health, which is thinking together upon common problems. 
There is pressing need that the schools should develop a primarily 
humane and neighborly attitude toward the members of every 
faction, toward the maligned capitalist and toward the maligned 
I.W.W. or other discontented person. One might plead this on 
the ground of good sportsmanship or clean fighting. But higher 
ground can be alleged; it is that, having committed ourselves to 
the principle of managing our general interests through the general 
will, we have therein committed ourselves to thinking by the people 
themselves as the mode of control; that, to start this popular 
thought going, and then withhold in our educational system the 
data for thought, and even prevent the relations between citizens 
that can alone make common thinking possible, is the sheerest 
folly from every point of view. It is the way to make dense 
radicals and dense conservatives alike, and ultimately to substi- 
tute explosion for regulation by thought. No, the schools must 
help us to get acquainted with one another, so that we shall find 
out how human we all are, and at last discover what it is that is 
hurting us all and robbing us of the friendship that belongs to us. 


The main outcomes of such a policy in the schools 
would be as follows: First, vocational preparation for 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 117 


business and industry, even as they are at present organ- 
ized, would be furthered. Second, citizens of all classes 
—capitalists, managers, and workers—would begin 
their career knowing what are the major problems of 
their generation. What could be more disjointed than 
an educational system that sends forth young people 
unconscious of the social problems that need to be solved, 
and bent only upon enforcing some trouble-making con- 
ventional point of view? Conversely, who can estimate 
the acceleration of social progress that would result if 
the schools should only get the hang of teaching how to 
find the major problems, how to find data upon them, and 
how to think together? Third, the young would begin 
their economic careers with a more realistic set of 
assumptions, with clearer insight into moral situations, 
and with ambitions better related to the welfare, the 
peace, and the progress of society. 


Il 


But would not this educational policy unfit the 
young for our economic order? Would not the contrast 
between the school and after-life be too great? Let us 
squarely face this doubt. 

In the project principle as it is now developing there 
are three aspects that are of first importance for our 
present problem: (a) Purposeful activities of the pupil 
himself are believed to constitute the most educative 
sort of experience, and purpose is conceived to include 
thinking—on occasion, the whole gamut of it, from 
feeling a problem and defining it, on through the forming 
of hypotheses and the gathering of data, to experimental 
and other methods of testing. (6) The pupils are led 


118 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


to discover problems not merely in subject-matter and 
school conditions that are prearranged by school authori- 
ties, but also, and perhaps preferably, in “‘life-situations” 
that arise spontaneously, school or no school. (¢) An 
especial point is made of leading pupils to do all this 
discovering, thinking, purposing, planning, executing, 
and criticizing together. At no other point is the contrast 
between the “old pedagogy” and the project principle 
quite as sharp, I believe, as it is here. Instead of asking 
whether the pupil sees and agrees with the teacher, 
we are more concerned that pupils should see and agree 
with one another, each helping the other to be objective- 
minded, and all together arriving at common knowledge 
and common purposes, or else at differences that all 
can understand and respect. 

How does this sort of experience compare with real 
life in the economic sphere? ‘The answer is, or ought to 
be, startling. In the vast majority of the operations of 
the vast majority of men one rarely finds or solves a 
problem, one does not think (for this is not. what one is 
paid for doing), much less is there any thinking together. 
One rarely forms or executes purposes of one’s own except 
the one monotonous purpose to finish one’s task and 
draw one’s pay. Creating a product that expresses one’s 
self—this belongs to the privileged few. Thinking 
together, and creating together—this is done in advance 
in the inner offices of the establishment. Even the 
owners of the capital, the scattered stockholders, rarely 
do any thinking or planning with respect to production. 
They merely draw the dividends or pocket the losses that 
have been brought to pass by managers who may be 
hundreds of miles away. As to common enjoyments, 


THE SCHOOL AND ECONOMIC LAW 119g 


who goes to a factory or a department store, or a counting- 
room for any such purpose? No, one flies from one’s 
occupation in order to find freedom, joy, and fellowship. 

Even where, as in managerial circles, thinking and 
creating are experienced, the “togetherness’’ is limited 
and ungenerous, for a part of the purpose is to concen- 
trate benefits in the few by getting ahead of competitors. 
And the sphere of one’s creativeness is restricted. Some 
of the zest of inquiry, discovery, productivity, is here, 
to be sure, but not enough to fill men’s capacities. For 
managers are bound by a rigid business orthodoxy that 
forbids large social experimentation. As in a vise, 
the standard of profits holds their thinking. If they 
yield to some humanitarian motive, they feel themselves 
under obligation to prove that it is profitable. Imagine 
the slavery of the mind in a system that requires one to 
camouflage one’s most manly acts! Consider the limita- 
tions of men who are not allowed to plan any better 
way of feeding the world than by competition in food- 
stuffs! We.have seen eminent men spending themselves 
and their substance generously in charity drives to feed 
starving multitudes but at the same time insisting that 
prices should be fixed by competition. 

There results a deplorable lack of individuality, a 
dull monotony of the type “‘business man.”’ And there 
results, likewise, lack of foresight. Consider, for 
example, the way in which large employers have com- 
monly resisted legislation directed to the safety and wel- 
fare of employees—bills that require factory owners to 
place safeguards around dangerous machinery are an 
instance. Of course, the general effect of such laws 
is to make the consumer pay for the safety of the em- 


120 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


ployee. All that was necessary, then, even from the 
employer’s point of view, was to induce, employers in 
different competing states to push everywhere for the 
enactment of such laws. But such thinking together, 
even with other manufacturers, is not characteristic, and 
so legislation of this type was opposed even when anyone 
with half an eye could see that it would inevitably pass. 
The point of this illustration is, not that manufacturers 
are different from other persons, but that the present 
presuppositions of business so cramp human powers that 
men even of great ability are almost automatically made 
into reactionaries. 

It is true that economic life, is on the whole, a system 
of control by thinking. To this extent it is project 
experience. But how undeveloped in the case of both 
employer and employee, and how inferior to our better 
schools in freedom, freshness, objectivity, and co- 
operation. Clearly, schools that employ the project 
principle with anything like thoroughness cannot pre- 
pare the young for continuing unchanged our present 
modes of economic life. And who can desire that this 
should be done? It would amount to maintaining sick 
schools in order to perpetuate a sick society. Our prob- 
lem is to maintain healthy schools to the end that society 
may healthily change and grow. The basis upon which 
alone this is possible is the one already so fully indicated: 
Let the school stick to whatever is known to be true 
either scientifically or historically, and let it cultivate 
in each new generation that which is at once the most 
conservative and the most radical thing in life, sincere 
respect for all men. On this basis we might maintain 
healthy schools even in a sick society. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK 
SOCIETY 


It may be assumed---probably no one would contest 
the assumption—that schooling is intended to represent 
and prepare for society, not just as it is, but as it would 
like to be, or at least as it is capable of becoming. We 
do not say to pupils: ‘‘Use the English language as the 
majority use it”; or, “Govern your city as majorities 
always have governed it”; or, “‘Manage international 
affairs by good, old-fashioned diplomacy”’; or, ‘‘“Maintain 
the competitive system just as you find it”; or, ‘“Take 
sides in the class struggle just as we are doing”; or, “‘If 
your morality is as high as ours, it is high enough”’; or, 
“You need not be any more humane than we are”: 
no, we select the men, the incidents, the phases of life 
to which to expose the young, and we hide from them 
much of what we are, hoping that they will escape 
some of the pits into which we have fallen. 

Such being our habit—such being the nature of 
schools—it should cause no surprise or embarrassment 
that almost throughout the preceding chapters education 
through rationally purposeful activities of children has 
appeared to be antithetical to common ways of adults. 
In any progressive civilization, surely, the school should 
be expected to be ahead of society, and therefore to 
embody a critique upon current modes of life. Whoever 
presents the purposes and methods of education—whether 


I2I 


“ 


122 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


the project principle or any other—in such a way that 
no strain is felt between them and our adult ways, does 
thereby convict himself of misrepresenting the educa- 
tive process. He misrepresents, in fact, his own age, 
which does not desire merely to be copied by the next 
generation. We are sodden enough, but not so sodden 
as not to want others to be better than ourselves. Here, 
in this self-criticism, this divine discontent, latent and 
confused though it be at times, is a chief glory of human 
nature. Ours is a self-reconstructing nature. If it 
puts its ideals at times into cold storage, it at least does 
not destroy them, and anon it brings them forth, applies 
them, and reconstructs them. The contrast between 
school projects and adult projects that have cropped up 
all along our journey may, then, conceivably be a part of 
the evidence that we are on the right track. At any rate, 
we shall do well to see whither our discussion is going. 

These, then, are the main antitheses between current 
adult life and the particular conception of school projects 
that this essay has endeavored to unfold: 


Current adult life takes natural law inconsiderately as an 
invitation to exploit natural resources wastefully and selfishly, 
and to indulge worthless, self-defeating, injurious, or too costly 
desires. The school can help in this matter by developing projects 
that illuminate these facts, and oppose the wastes and burdens 
that otherwise will be entailed upon the next generation. 

Mankind is by nature overready for action, and underready 
for objective self-judgment. Even the wisdom of our wisest 
leaders is therefore infected with a constant tendency toward 
irrationality. The school can help by developing in pupils a 
habit of self-criticism, and a corresponding habit of caution with 
respect to the projects of adults. 

Our society exposes children and young people to a multitude 
of stimuli that tend toward overexcitement, fragmentariness, 


THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK SOCIETY 123 


shallowness, and irreverence. The school can help by developing 
projects that sift the wheat from the chaff in these stimuli. 

Our school laws are defective in that pupils, because they have 
no right to participate in school government, are not permitted to 
have any thoroughgoing experience of democracy. Further, our 
constitutions, unconscious of the principle of learning to govern 
by governing, grant the franchise upon the basis of mere age. 
The schools can take the initiative toward securing improvement 
in these laws and constitutions. 

The moral life of men tends continually to become conventional 
and lacking in creative vigor. The reason for this is partly self- 
imitation and imitation of the past; partly that we maintain, 
alongside of our professed principles, a working, self-excusing 
code; partly that we let minor loyalties—our very virtues— 
blind us to the need of larger ones. The schools can help by 
developing discriminating loyalties, as against undiscriminating 
emotional ones; by cultivating moral realism in the form of direct, 
original judgments upon good and evil; and by practice in devising 
and revising standards in accordance with known needs of men. 

The economic life of our time provides no sufficient experience 
of initiative and creativity, or of control by thinking, and especially 
by thinking together. Business and industry tend to become 
mechanized and inhuman. The privileged as well as the un- 
privileged are living cramped lives. The schools, by pursuing the 
project method in the direction of the economic order, can send into 
it young persons already habituated to thinking together, and 
already alive to the major problems that the new generation must 
face. 


Problems and difficulties more or less like these will 
always confront the schools. They are normal to educa- 
tion as such. Yet we of the United States have reason 
to feel them with peculiar poignancy at the present 
moment. For the channels of progress that are normal 
to our experiment as a free people are seriously clogged. 
We believe ourselves to be highly progressive, yet we 
are fumbling the instruments of progress with half- 


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124 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


palsied hands. A deep distrust of reason has seized upon 
us, and we are sick and staggering and ill-natured as a 
consequence. That this should occur in an age of 
unparalleled scientific and historical knowledge, and of 
unparalleled technic of many kinds, may appear to be 
paradoxical, but perhaps it is a part of our sickness that 
we confuse reason with the possession of a stock of facts, 
or handiness in amassing more facts, or ability to com- 
mand great natural and human forces. That we do 
deeply distrust reason is shown by the following char- 
acteristic tendencies of our society: 


The prevalent distrust of mankind, and the accompanying 
belief in force—distrust of other peoples, with consequent reliance 
upon arms for security; distrust of immigrants, and insistence that 
they become like us or get out; distrust of the humanity in our 
economic opponents, and resort, in times of acute strain, to force 
of many sorts, including espionage, private hired armies, and 
partisan control of the agencies of government (administrative 
officers, police, even courts); distrust of the ability of government 
to govern, and resort to various organizations, some of them 
secret, that by lawless means endeavor to “make law and order 
prevail”; distrust of schools and of school teachers, and resulting 
legislation that calls for oaths of allegiance and “‘smelling com- 
mittees”; distrust, even, of one’s capacity for disinterested or 
noble conduct, and degraded acceptance of the doctrine that others 
must force us to be good or we shall not be good at all. 

The growth of class consciousness, with its assumption that 
my class must prevail and others must go under. This implies a 
denial that common ground exists that might be discovered by 
thinking together. In effect it enthrones some special interest, 
some arbitrary and non-rational preference. 

The revival of dogmatism in many directions, and the con- 
sequent growth of intolerance. The widespread reactionism in 
religious thought is paralleled by a new, dogmatic, intolerant 
“Americanism,” and by economic dogmatism that labels dissenters 


THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK SOCIETY 125 


by terms intended to convey opprobrium, employs spies in order 
to entrap liberal professors and ministers and thus secure their 
removal from office, and finally induces the state to imprison the 
most helpless of the industrial dissenters. 

Overgrown reliance upon institutional mechanisms, and loss 
of appreciation for informal association of men with one another. 
Almost everywhere we witness an enormous increase in the 
“overhead” part of organizations. As the “overhead” charges 
upon industrial production have almost reached the breaking- 
point, so the managerial functions in churches, colleges, school 
systems, and many kinds of associations, have come to be almost 
identified with the functions of these institutions and organizations 
themselves. The most sought-for man as administrator is the 
one who can keep masses of men contentedly moving in pre- 
determined grooves. In short, it is assumed that men are to be 
manipulated, not stimulated to think. The many are taken to 
be, not so many minds that might shine of their own light, not 
possible creators and guides of a common rational life, but fingers, 
hands, tools, for those who arrogate wisdom to themselves. — 

The prevalent assumption that the things of the spirit can get 
on only by the favor of those who have great possessions. That 
men of means so generally believe themselves competent, by 
virtue of their business experience, to guide the destinies of colleges 
and universities, churches, and all manner of institutions, is not 
as much their own fault as it is a symptom of the general sickness of 
the age. The consequence is that living reason, which must pro- 
duce out of its treasure things new as well as old, does not find 
itself comfortable in our institutions. How can it be, when it 
sees learning’s own stamp, and religion’s own stamp, with studied 
deference, placed upon mere ownership? An ominous hush 
prevails at just the points where learning should pass over into 
reason and wisdom, free criticism of institutions, and sacrificial 
labor for reconstruction. We have specialists in this and that field 
of research, and we have technicians who can tell us how to get 
whatever money or force can procure, but we grievously lack men 
who can and will tell us what sort of life, what sort of men, and 
what sort of social institutions are worth while, and how they 
can be produced. 


126 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


The present rejuvenescence of the old Americanesque fear of 
our own freedom. Not content with a constitutional system that 
not only prevents hasty change but even makes it difficult to 
ascertain and record a changed will at all, we hedge ourselves about 
with unnecessary precautions against “going too fast” or “going 
too far.”” We have become more afraid of going too far than of 
not going at all, or of going in the wrong direction. One might 
suppose that reason, if given an open road, would sufficiently 
shun the unreasonable, and that the necessary caution for us 
inveterate imitators would be to be rational rather than slow, and 
to go far enough to satisfy the issues that are or ought to be before 
us. But no; having won our freedom, having established our 
right to think, to make changes, to follow reason, we turn about and 
only timidly and half-heartedly use the very privilege for which 
we should stake life itself. 

The enormous increase (made possible to a large extent by 
advances in psychology) in effective schemes for doing the people’s 
thinking for them under the pretense of giving them information 
and inviting them to judge for themselves. This is coming to be 
designated as propaganda. The essence of it is “getting over” 
your own predetermined view under some sort of false pretense. 
The shamelessness with which this art is practiced both by govern- 
ments and by economic interests is amazing; and it is portentous, 
for most of the agencies of public information already have become 
engines of propaganda. When one reads the “news” dispatches 
in the respectable as well as the ‘‘yellow”’ press, one may be and 
often is subjecting one’s self to subtle influences deliberately 
directed toward the formation of a particular opinion that may or 
may not be true, a self-commitment that may or may not be just. 
Thus, more and more, the human mind is assumed to be a thing 
to be manipulated, and persons, instead of being objects of infinite 
value, become commodities to be bought at auction. 


Yes, our society is sick because it fears reason. 
What, then, do I mean by reason? Obviously not a 
body of already formulated propositions, but the thing 
in us that does the formulating, the criticizing, and the 


THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK SOCIETY 127 


reformulating. The scientific attitude is a part of it, 
and this attitude is nowhere more in evidence than in 
the fact that the sciences continually grow by revising 
themselves. But other human wants also belong to 
reason, not only desire for knowledge, but also desire 
for beauty, desire for fellowship, desire for food and for 
whatsoever else makes knowledge, beauty, and fellow- 
ship possible. Wants, like science, have no fixed and 
irrevocable formulas. Often they emerge out of dim- 
ness into clear light; or they grow from seeds to great 
trees; and always misapprehensions of them may need 
to be corrected, and errors, even on a large scale, may 
have to be overthrown. But wants, thus co-ordinated, 
self-corrected, and growing, are inherent in rationality 
itself. Wheresoever desires and satisfactions are dis- 
criminated from one another, and thought is taken for 
supplying the approved want, there resides at least a 
germ of reason, which I, if I am to be rational, must 
recognize as there. In other words, mutual recognition 
or valuing of persons just as persons, mutual modification 
of one’s own desires by valuing the desires of others, and 
co-operative thinking, purposing, and executing in the 
interest of what is mutually wanted—this is the very 
base line of rationality. 

Now, this, precisely this, is the substratum of the 
project principle as it is developing in educational 
thought. ‘The principle certainly outruns the ways of 
adult society, whether political, economic, ecclesiastical, 
or broadly cultural; yes, this principle will always outrun 
actual society because it is itself the principle of social 
growth. Now, this outrunning of the ways of adult 
society is one of the essential functions of the school. People 


~ 


128 LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


want the school to do it, and they furnish the backing for 
doing it. Clumsy and unpractical as we Americans 
have been in handling our school problems, nevertheless 
there is truth in the old comment that the one common 
faith of all Americans is faith in education. ‘The glad 
hope of a new, more humane civilization in this new land, 
so free from precedents, focused itself unerringly in 
the school as a chief organ of the better future. Indeed, 
how could one better describe the healthy school than as 
one in which society seeks the whole of the rationality 
that as yet it has only partly achieved? The healthy 
school expresses society’s better self, by implication 
accusing its lower self, and by overt action revaluing its 
values, and above all affirming and practicing the social 
unity that is of the essence of goodness and of reason. 
We can have healthy schools even in a sick society, 
just as we can have real science among men who are 
liable to fallacies and prejudices, and just as we can have 
public sanitation even when it runs counter to great 
financial interests. ‘The key to health in our schools is 
knowledge on the part of educators of what social health 
is, and a right professional spirit. By “professional 
spirit” I do not mean anything that discriminates the 
salaried expert from wage-earning employees. Let us 
start, rather, from the other end, thinking of ourselves 
as servants, bound to do the will of our master. Who, 
then, is the master of the schoolmaster? Surely, not 
the board that votes our wages, for its members are 
fellow-servants with us, administrators, with us, of a 
public trust. Thus, our question goes back to this: 
Who is the master, who is to be served, when citizens, 
acting either as voters of the state, or as members of a 


THE HEALTHY SCHOOL IN A SICK SOCIETY 129 


church, or even as private donors, determine that 
schools shall be? Are they serving themselves? Obvi- 
ously not in any large measure. Are they acting, then, 
as servants of the children? Yes, and no; not the pres- 
ent narrow will of the children, but a hoped-for, rational 
will. The master of the schoolmaster is the better, 
or rational, self of society, whose property it is always 
to judge actual society and always to point the way of 
improvement. The superintendent, principal, teacher, 
or college president who makes himself servant of pupils, 
or of parents, or of boards of trustees, in any other sense 
than this lacks the professional spirit and is in danger 
of becoming pander rather than educator. 

As the researcher in science or history serves neither 
self nor party, but the truth; as the true physician, when 
he faces disease, is guided neither by self-interest nor 
by opinions of the patient nor by popular conceptions of 
healing; as the faithful minister of religion endeavors to 
obey God rather than men, so the real educator, enduring 
(if need be) as seeing the invisible, leads forward into 
freedom a society that is fettered by selfishness and by 
institutionalized timidities. He leads society into free- 
dom by leading children into it, and this he does by giving 
them practice in it. He lets free that within us that is 
ready to rebuke our selfishness, our partisanship, our 
institutionalism and dogmatism, our aloofness and class- 
feeling, and the nationalism that stands in the way of the 
unification of mankind. This means, not freedom from 
law, but freedom through law and through the making 
of law. We grow free only as we extend and deepen the 
bonds that unify us—only as we think, plan, act, judge, 
and enjoy together. 








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INDEX 


Abnormal children, 42 f. 


Action, over-readiness for, 18 f., 
20, 31 ff., 122 


Adolescence, 82, 84 
“Americanism,” 124, 126 
Amusements, 48 ff. 


Approval and disapproval, relation 
of to morals, 78 f. 


Arbitrariness, 65 

Athletics, College, 2 

Authority of the teacher, 46, 53; 
of adults, 65 f.; of pupils, 67, 
70 ff., 99, 123 


Bible, the, 10 

Boards of education and children, 
67 f. 

Boy Scouts, 3, 97 

Business morals, 80 f., 108 


Catholic industrial and economic 
standards, 113 


Child Labor Association, 113 

Child life, 15 f., 41 f., 63 

Child nature, directness of, 68 

aon of today uncontrolled, 
48 f. 

Christian thinkers 
nature, 36 

Churches and religious education, 
64, 67, 60, 72, 91, 129; see also 
“Sunday Schools” 

Citizenship, education for, 70 ff.; 
see also “Self-Government’”’ 

Class distinctions and class con- 
sciousness, 106 f., 108 f., 116, 124 

Colleges, the, 61 f., 68, 95 f., 97 

Community, — betterment 
through pupils’ projects, 63 

Competition, 108, 113 f. 


on human 


of, 


131 


Compulsion, 7, 12, 55, 62, 65, 73 

Conventionality as morality, 76 f., 
88, 98 

Creativity, chap. vii; 118 f., 123 

Cribbing, 22 f. 


Customs, response of children to, 
75, IOS—-II0 


Democracy, chap. vi, 40, 66, 68, 
UVES ETO. hae 
Dogmatism, 119, 124 


Economic laws, 5, 6, chap. vii; 
114 

Economic order, the, 35, 105 ff., 
117, 120, 123 

Education, informal, 107; leisure- 
class, 104; Is it living or 
preparing to live? 47; methods 
of moral, 93 ff.; religious, see 
“Churches”; vocational, 104, 
TIO fey see alsa. Schools, 
“Project Method,”’ etc. 


Eugenics, 18 f. 


Evolution, natural, 
moral, 74, 87 f. 


Op raai hey 


Family, the, significance of for 
moral education, 79 f., 94, II1; 
see also “ Parental impulse” 


Force, current belief in, 124 
Franchise of the citizen, 70 
Freedom, 1, 45 f., 54 f., 65, 126, 129 


Gambling, 23 

Gang, code of the, 79 

God, 9 f., 12, 85, 109, 115, 129 

saat the, and the ought, 83, 85 f., 
gr f. 


Government, the part of children 
in, see “‘Self-government” 


132 


Health, 4 f. 

High schools, see ‘Schools, second- 
ary ” 

Human nature, 30 ff., 40, 113 f., 
122 


Ideals, 9 ff. 
Individuality, 119 
Individual, the, and society, 56 


Industrial conditions and issues, 
106, 108, see also “Education, 
vocational”’ 


Initiative by pupils, 42, 67, 74, 123 


Jesus, 63 

Jewish industrial and economic 
standards, 113 

Juvenile court, 73 


Kilpatrick, W. H., 55 


Lawlessness of youth, 48 ff. 


Laws, different sorts of, v, chap. i; 
children as source of, 72 ff: 
civil, 6 f., 12; economic, 5 f., 
12, II0, 114; ideals as, 9 ff., 


12; moral, 7 ff., 12; chap. vi; 
chap. vii; 110; natural, 2 ff., 
Er, chap.) ty) 9 a7y EO, 7132; 


school regulations as, 6; wel- 
fare, 4 

Leadership by adults, 38 f., 65 f., 
93, 102 

Love of neighbor, 109 

Loyalty, the beginning of moral 
wisdom, 94 f.; must be dis- 
criminating, 96, 123 


Majorities and minorities, 116 

Mechanical aspect of civilization, 
125 

Money, the child and, 59 f., 106 

Moral awakenings, 81 f. 

Moral education, gaps in, 88 ff.; 
methods of, 93 ff 

Moral life, as adjustment to the 
existing social order, 87 f.; as 


LAW AND FREEDOM IN THE SCHOOL 


reconstruction of the social 

order, 92 ff., chap. vii; 123 
Moral standards of children, 79 f.; 

of adults, 80 f.; how ev 

89 f; how re-created, 82 ff., 85 


“Movies,” 50 


Nationalism, 124, 126, 129 
Natural law, see “Laws, natural” 


Natural resources, 16 f., 24 ff., 
II4, 122 


Nature and the project method, 
chap. iii 

Nature, human, 30 ff., 40, 113 f, 
122 

Normal children, 5, 42f.; see 
also ‘ Abnormal children” 


Obedience, 46, 96, 102 


Ought and ought not, as children 
feel them, 76; relation of, to 
good and bad, 83, 85 f., or f. 


Over-stimulation of the young, 
A-SI 522 


Parental impulse, 19, 35 f. 

Personality, vi, 57, 100 f., 126 f. 

Plato, 34, 36 

Poverty, 106 

Production, economic, 108, 114 

Profits and the profit-motive, 108, 
114, 119 

Project method, defined, vi; not 
yet fully explored, vii, 1; as 
the method of nature, chap. iii; 
is beset by illusory satisfactions 
31 ff., 38, 111; increases control 
by both teacher and pupil, 44 ff., 
implies joint action of pupil and 
society, 60, 62; does not 
exclude compulsion, 66 ff., 73; 
involves critique of adult. life, 
40; need of, as preparation for 
the franchise, 72 ff.; in relation 
to industrial and economic 
conditions, 105, 117-20, 123; 
is ye method of rationality, 
127 


INDEX 


Projects, self-disciplinary, 21, 47 f.; 
anti as well as pro, 23 ff, 28, 
35, 38; in community better- 
ment, 63; in religious education, 
64; in self-government, 99; 
philanthropic, 99; civic, 99; 
related to current events, 100; 
related to history and biography, 
100; related to business and 
industry, 100 f., 105, 112 ff.; 
related to modes of living, ror; 
related to world-friendship, 
ror f, 

Propaganda, methods of, 69, 113, 
126 

Property, private, nature and 
ethics of, 108, 115 f. 

Protestant industrial and eco- 
nomic standards, 113 

Public opinion, 8 f., 59, 69 

Purposeful activity, what it is, v 


Radicalism, 102 f., 116, 120 

“Rationalization,” 32, 38 f., 110 

Reason, present distrust of, 124- 
126; its nature, 34, 36 f., 127 f.; 
schools as instruments of, 127 f. 


Religion, 9 f., 37, 63 


Sacredness of persons, 115 f.; of 
property, 115 f. 

Schools, elementary and second- 
ary, 60 f.; secondary, and the 
colleges, 61 f., 95; regulations, 
6; laws, 58, 123; ideals of 
public, 109; influence of, 111; 
mot a transcript of society, 
TSU 1.197 1. 


133 


Science, and the control of nature, 
16; and the abnormal child, 
42 "Es .; and the normal child, 43; 
increases control by teacher, 

44 f.; and by pupil, too, 45 f. 


Senne attitude, the, 127, 129 
Self, the, how formed, 56, 75 
Self-discipline, 21, 47 f., 68 
Self-esteem, 32 f. 
Self-expression, 118 
Self-government, 70 ff., 99, 123 
Selfishness, 108, 112, 115, 122 


Sickness of society, chap. ix, esp. 
124 ff. 


Social classes, 106 f., 108 f., 116,124 
Social control, 67 ff. 

Social reconstruction, 40, 128 f. 
Social will, the, v, chap. v 

State, laws of the, 6 f. 


Success, standards of, 106, 108 f.; 
over-estimation of in projects, 32 


Sunday schools, 9, 64, 69, 79, 83, 
109, III 


Teacher, the, 4, 12, chap. iv 
Thinking, vi, 116-20, 123, 125 ff. 
Thrift, 89 f. 


Vocational education, 104, 116 f. 


Wants, inherent in rationality, 127 
War, 29 f., 113 f., 116 

War, The Great, 29 f., 108 
Wealth, 106, 125 


Mh year positive and negative, 
20 f. 


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